haha we played this game as a lab group!

Thanks!!

The source of our inspiration to do this analysis was this nice paper that came out a few months ago by Paul Jensen considering the distribution of research effort across bacterial species (doi.org/10.1101/2025...)

but when we DO study non-models we find really cool examples that force us to redefine the 'rules' of eukaryotic biology - like non-canonical genetic codes in ciliates and other lineages, NEW organelles being discovered still (hello nitroplast!) etc.

Second we sought to highlight bias in the distribution of what clades and types of protists are researched and where our major gaps are within protists - TDLR - most organisms studied are parasites biasing our understanding of the capabilities of eukaryotic cells...

First, protists are often forgotten when we talk about microbiology. This is obviously reflected in the number of ALL mentions of protists, including all parasites on pubmed (242,844) vs ONLY e. coli (312,057) (Jensen, 2025)

Woohoo, congrats Katie!!

Wish I were there this year 😭 have a great time!!

absolutely! and why community-level insights from MAGs so much harder w/more diverse ecosystems

definitely expected to be a lot lower! more diversity... harder to capture full comm via mags... so less recruitment - not sure what good is these days but 10% seems reasonable / expected for soil.. perhaps even lower