Yana Eglit
Researcher specialising in protist diversity and evolution, with particular interest in the variety among eukaryotic cellular architecture. I believe unicellular protists are where cell biology is at its most exciting, as everything the organism needs must fit inside that cell. Currently a HFSP postdoctoral fellow in the Guichard/Hamel Lab at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where I am learning super-resolution imaging techniques (like expansion microscopy) and how to apply them to non-model protists. Previously was a postdoc in the Gawryluk lab at the University of Victoria, where I cultivated marine anaerobic eukaryotes for investigating the evolution of adaptation to life at low oxygen. Completed my PhD in 2022 with Alastair G.B. Simpson in the Biology Department and Institute for Comparative Genomics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada, where I isolated, cultivated, and characterised novel branches of the Tree of Eukaryotes.
Key interests
Exploration of new protist diversity by ‘manual’ identification and cultivation: Cultivation enables downstream work on the organism by ‘domesticating’ it for the lab, but also appears to access diversity that is not currently readily detected by environmental sequencing methods. I’m particularly interested in traditionally understudied protists: benthic heterotrophic flagellates from low-oxygen and/or high salt and/or high pH environments, and eukaryotrophs (protists that feed on other protists).
Studying cell structure by light and electron microscopy: Unicellular protists are where eukaryotic cell biology is truly at its best, since the individual cell must do (nearly1) everything itself. I’m obsessed with trying to document rare or difficult to visualise aspects of protist biology, from predation to cell division. The microbial world is just as complex and dynamic as the macroscopic flora and fauna one sees on a walk through a forest, and we can only catch glimpses of it on a slide.
This provides some opportunity for art.Placing organisms in the tree of life by molecular phylogenetics: I use both ‘traditional’ PCR-amplified Sanger-sequenced ribosomal small subunit rDNA (“18S”) phylogenetics and Illumina-sequenced transcriptome-derived concatenated multi-gene phylogenomics for finding the closest known relatives of my organisms. I have also worked on automating some of the process of preparing phylogenies for publication figures, and a tool for a targetted search of short read metabarcoding datasets for sequences similar to an unpublished (and not yet integrated in reference taxonomic databases) query.
Using protists as teaching tools: Many protists are safe, abundant, and easy to grow, therefore making them excellent candidates for use in teaching labs. I am also interested in accessing protists at biological field stations to teach methods in eukaryotic microbiology, such as identification, cultivation, and sequencing of strange new microbes. In June 2026, I will be living out this dream by co-organising and teaching at MicroSEA, a protistology field course at Station Biologique de Roscoff, Bretagne, FR.
Links and contact
Footnotes
Technically, symbioses and general ecology make none of us truly self-sufficient↩︎