Other than the scientific findings, the major lesson here is don't leave academia and think you'll finish your big paper in your spare time. You won't.

This paper was the main focus of work during my postdoc, and almost exactly 5 years after leaving ETH it's being published at last. I'm incredibly grateful to Maria, Alena, Jörn, and the rest of the team who turned a big pile of genomes, annotations, and spreadsheets into an incredible paper.

With this dataset, we can start thinking about the evolution of this bacterial taxon, of their symbiotic relationship with sponges, and of their biosynthetic complement.

(the lesson is don't be a huge piece of shit)