Built from and for ecologists, molecular biologists, and bioinformaticians working with high-throughput or environmental sequencing data, this tool will ease the tedious work of designing specific oligonucleotides at all different users expertise.

With just two FASTA files (targets & non-targets), oligoN-design identifies taxon-specific oligonucleotides. No alignments, phylogenetic trees, or reference databases required.
It integrates smoothly with tools like BLAST, VSEARCH, and MAFFT, and runs efficiently even on personal computers.

#protistsonsky

A lovely collaboration with @plannapus.bsky.social, Noritoshi & @fabnot.bsky.social, where we merged the extensive groundwork on the Polycystine fossil record with extant molecular diversity to trace the evolutionary history of Radiolaria from their appearance ~760 million years ago

Ah! And if you arrived until here and were wondering about the little golden dots, yes, they are photosynthetic symbionts identified as Scrippsiella. A common dinoflagellate found in symbioses with other planktonic groups like Acantharia (also Radiolaria) or the jellyfish Vellela

We hypothesize that such a trait could increase the effective volume to weight ratio favoring prey contact and capture, and provide an advantageous microenvironment for symbionts, enhancing ecological success in nutrient-depleted waters.
Pictures credit of @n-llopis-m.bsky.social, by the way!

Despite Phlebarachnium was rarely observed, metabarcoding analyses revealed a strong biogeographic affinity to oligotrophic water masses and co-occurrence with other gelatinous-bearing Radiolaria, reaching relative abundances of more than 13% to the total eukaryotic reads in specific samples

We introduce the first molecular characterization of Phlebarachnium, one of the few Radiolaria known to live within a gelatinous matrix besides Collodaria. Yet these lineages of Nassellaria developed independently the ability to produce the gelatinous matrix ∼150 million years ago