- New lab pre-print up! "Twelve species of human parasites make up half the literature on microbial eukaryotes" doi.org/10.1101/2025... We (led by UG Joanna Lepper and with @hbrappap.bsky.social) quantified all mentions of protist species in the scientific literature 🧵 #protistsonsky #microsky
- 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)Aug 22, 2025 11:07
- 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...
- 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.
- 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...)
