Julian Vosseberg

Prediction of eukaryotic cellular complexity in Asgard archaea using structural modelling - Nature Microbiology A structural catalogue of the Asgard archaeal pangenome reveals hundreds of eukaryotic-like proteins that suggest a higher degree of cellular complexity in the archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes.

🧵 1/10 New paper out in @natmicrobiol.nature.com from my postdoc at @mib-wur.bsky.social! 🎉

How eukaryote-like was the archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes? Sequence searches alone can't tell us — so we used protein structure prediction to look deeper. 🧬
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Diversity, ecology, cell biology and evolution of the Asgard archaea - Nature Reviews Microbiology The Asgard archaea have become a cornerstone of archaeal research, particularly for studies aiming to unravel the origin and early evolution of eukaryotes. This Review outlines the current state of th...

Just over ten years after the discovery of the first Asgard archaeal genomes, we revisit the rapid expansion of this remarkable archaeal lineage. From diverse genomes and metabolisms to eukaryotic signature proteins and the first cultured representatives.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Finally out in @nature.com: a new piece of the puzzle of how complex life evolved. Lead by @archaeal.bsky.social & @katyappler.bsky.social. Great collab with @greening.bsky.social and @kassipan.bsky.social. More pieces to follow soon! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today we published a Correction on our 2023 @nature.com paper reporting the heimdallarchaeial ancestry of eukaryotes: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Corrected paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Importantly, the re-analyses of the corrected dataset are consistent with the original findings.

Our latest preprint: Together with the team of Jan Löwe, @danieltamarit.bsky.social and many others we discovered and characterized several Asgard tubulin genes and propose that microtubule architecture and dynamics evolved in Asgard archaea prior to eukaryogenesis
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We have an open position for a bioinformatics/theoretical microbial ecology PhD student to study viral strategies in the global Microverse! Join us at the @microverse.bsky.social at @uni-jena.de, please apply through this link:
jobs.uni-jena.de/jobposting/9...

I have a postdoc position in metagenomic exploration available in my group. Candidates with documented experience in phylo & metagenomics and preferably with petabase-scale data mining and GLM workflows are encouraged to apply. Come join us! 🧬🦠💻

Please repost

Apply here: www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p...

Are you a long-time fan of Archaea, an extremophile-phile, or are you simply curious?

Either way, we have good news.
We’re delighted to announce the 2026 EMBO Workshop on Archaea, 6–10 July.

Sign up: meetings.embo.org/event/26-arc...

We look forward to seeing you in Cambridge, UK.

Please repost!

a man walking in a field with an umbrella ALT: a man walking in a field with an umbrella

Come join us! Soon I will be advertising a postdoc vacancy in my group as part of my @erc.europa.eu AdG project 'DARK ROOTS'. Focus of the project will be on phylo- and metagenomic mining of novel prokaryotic lineages. I will soon post a link here - stay tuned, and please repost! #asgardarchaea

Phylogenetic reconciliation supports a methanogenic ancestor of the Archaea and a derived origin for host-associated lineages The phylogeny of the Archaea continues to be revisited and revised as new groups are discovered and phylogenetic methods improve, but key questions about their early evolution remain. It has been sugg...

#Archaea, #DPANN, #phylogenetic_reconciliation
New preprint online!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments

Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Doe. Het. Niet.

Bezuinig niet op het onderwijs! 🟥

Vandaag maakt het CDA in de Eerste Kamer wéér dezelfde fout als eerder dit jaar door de bezuinigingen van de VVD aan een meerderheid te helpen..

Stem morgen op een partij die het onderwijs niet laat vallen! 🔴🟢

CDA-leider Bontenbal: religieus onderwijs mag botsen met grondrecht van gelijkheid Dat religieuze scholen homoseksuele relaties afwijzen, is volgens CDA-leider Henri Bontenbal nu eenmaal een gevolg van de vrijheid van onderwijs. Daar wil hij niet aan tornen. "Een andere mening doet ...

Nou nee, dat mag niet.

Een school moet een veilige plek zijn voor álle leerlingen. Dat staat ook in de wet. Het afwijzen van homoseksuele relaties geeft de boodschap dat iemand niet zichzelf mag zijn.

Dat mag niet én is ronduit schadelijk.

nos.nl/nieuwsuur/co...

And thanks to all poster presenters, including Moisès Bernabeu whose poster was in the top 5 of best posters at #ESEB2025. Congrats!

Then @kassipan.bsky.social from Wageningen University showed her PhD work to expand the genome diversity in the PVC superphylum, finding multiple phylum-level lineages and opening a door to investigating the cool cellular features in this phylum.

Way to go, Kassi! #ProudSupervisor

#ESEB2025

Great to see so many people at our symposium om the origin of eukaryotes. Thanks to all the speakers! #ESEB25 @julianvosseberg.bsky.social

Interactive symbiosis in silico (back) and in vivo (front). #ESEB25

academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-...

Happy to share this one. We investigated the #phylogenetic placement and #genome_evolution of Pangui/Njordarchaea-unique #Asgardarchaea that might have undergone genome reduction...

WitChi: Efficient Detection and Pruning of Compositional Bias in Phylogenomic Alignments Using Empirical Chi-Squared Testing Convergent evolution, where unrelated taxa independently evolve similar nucleotide or amino acid compositions, can introduce compositional bias into biological sequence data. Such biases distort phylo...

1.
🧵 New preprint out!
WitChi: a fast, open-source Python tool to detect, quantify & prune compositional bias in MSAs.
Lightweight, tree-free, scalable to 5k+ taxa... so we applied it to the GTDB archaea MSA.
#ArchaeaSky #MEvoSky #MicroSky
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
💻 github.com/stephkoest/w...

Phylogenomic analyses reveal that Panguiarchaeum is a clade of genome-reduced Asgard archaea within the Njordarchaeia The Asgard archaea are a diverse archaeal phylum important for our understanding of cellular evolution because they include the lineage that gave rise to eukaryotes. Recent phylogenomic work has focus...

#Asgard,#phylogeny
1/ 🧵 Does MAGs contamination affect the placement of Njord as suggested by Zhang et al, 2025? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Our updated analysis suggests instead... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New vacancy in my team!

PhD student position on microbial genome evolution, focusing on the evolutionary principles underlying bacterial genome architecture.

Please repost and share with talented MSc students in #evobio, bioinformatics or related :)

www.uu.nl/en/organisat...

#MEvoSky #MicroSky

Wageningen Universiteit schrapt banen vanwege bezuinigingen De komende jaren verdwijnen er waarschijnlijk 130 tot 180 banen.

Binnenkort ook aan de WUR: bijltjesdag. Weer een ontzettend verdrietig gevolg van de onnodige bezuinigingen op hoger onderwijs en onderzoek van dit kabinet, gesteund door de destructieve oppositie van oa CDA, CU en SGP. Lekker gewerkt Eppo!

nos.nl/l/2567448

One week left to submit your abstract! @eseb2025.bsky.social

Today we @mib-wur.bsky.social are on strike against the budget cuts in higher education.
#StopTheCuts

#ESEB2025 Exciting symposium alert: (S50) Unravelling the origin of eukaryotes. 🦑🌴 With speakers Purificación López-García and Mark Field. We are looking forward to your abstract submissions! eseb2025.com/list-of-symp... @julianvosseberg.bsky.social

Postdoc Comparative genomics and genome architecture in early-diverging fungi and their protist relatives (3-year position)

Exciting news! I'm looking for a computational biologist to join my lab at Wageningen University & Research! It's a 3-year postdoc position on Holomycota genome architecture and evolution. Spread the word! www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p...

Chimeric origins and dynamic evolution of central carbon metabolism in eukaryotes Nature Ecology & Evolution - Analysis of the eukaryotic gene repertoires mediating central carbon metabolism identifies ancestral contributions from Alphaproteobacteria, Asgardarchaeota and...

Asgardarchaea & Alphaproteobacteria: key players for the assembly eukaryotic central carbon metabolism! Our new study reveals their gene contributions to glycolysis & TCA cycle, supporting synthrophic scenarios of eukaryogenesis.
rdcu.be/eb0aK

Hey 🦋 people and especially archaea friends,
I made a starter pack with the current team of the Ettema lab by @ettema.bsky.social
on this platform :)
go.bsky.app/MzZPftE

Together with @ettema.bsky.social, @jvhooff.bsky.social, @stephkoe.bsky.social, Kassiani Panagiotou and @danieltamarit.bsky.social

The emerging view on the origin and early evolution of eukaryotic cells - Nature This Review summarizes key events in the emergence of cellular complexity via eukaryogenesis in the light of developments in environmental and comparative genomics during the past decade.

Many novel Asgard genomes, cultivated Lokiarchaeia, new phylogenetic analyses: what insights do these and other recent studies provide into the enigmatic origin of eukaryotes? In this review in Nature, we discuss the latest findings and open questions: www.nature.com/articles/s41...