I have a fabulous undergrad who has a lot of experience with QIIME2 & using R to analyze microbiome data. She is looking for a job starting in January. Would love to learn more bench and field skills (will be getting some in her last 2 months). Open to academic, industry, government jobs in the US.

First publication from our lab!

Hello world! Today’s officially the first day of the lab! It’s an empty space currently only filled with ideas (that I don’t have card access to yet 😂) but I’m excited for the science that will happen here! -JCG

Excited to share a new preprint w/ the Sonnenberg lab, led by Matt Carter, @zzzhiru.bsky.social & @mattolm.bsky.social. We analyzed the microbiomes of two non-industrialized populations from opposite sides of the globe to try to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of our gut microbiota.

Snails with human-like eyes?! Published in @natcomms.nature.com, the @planaria1.bsky.social & @accorsi-alice.bsky.social Labs have established apple snails as a novel model for studying vision restoration. They have complex camera-type eyes & the ability to regrow them in 28 days: bit.ly/4mvaxkq

"feels like" is correct because it gives the IMPRESSION of expertise. Just asked GPT5-Thinking a few questions I had asked my PhD students this week... let me tell you, our jobs are safe in this regard LOL If you believe what it says, it's on you.

Congrats to postdoc Zhe Zhou on her paper out today in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social showing that gut bacteria cross-feed a common dietary antioxidant to produce energy under anaerobic conditions. Thanks to collaborators Angela Jiang and Xiaofang Jiang at NIH. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Microbiology professor, want to join a slack for microbiology professors, any career stage, diverse career types (pure teaching, med school, R1, community college, pure research fed PIs, ...) Message me for an invite link if you are interested. No imposter syndrome, if you are 1% micro, join!

The Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more. recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601

Thrilled to share the first preprint from my group! Prevotella are predominant but understudied members of the respiratory microbiome. They have a reputation for being hard to work with, but understanding them is likely important for understanding how they contribute to respiratory health. 🧫🔬

Yet again burned by the "this Friday" vs "next Friday" ambiguity. whyyyyy English language, whyyyy

𝐍𝐨, 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐋𝐋𝐌 𝐨𝐫 𝐝𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐋𝐌 𝐮𝐬𝐞. See our paper for more results: "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task" : www.brainonllm.com

Any friends going to ASM Microbe? Let me know so we can catch up!!

Cool paper showing 🦠 recipient response to #plasmid conjugation Capsule blocks conjugation, preventing MPF between donor:recipient. However, conjugation exploits recipient strain heterogeneity of capsule thickness, conjugating to cells with less capsule #MicroSky 🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Koonin Law of Computatoinal Biology: Whenever you think you have a great idea in computational or evolutionary biology, it will already have been published by Eugene Koonin in the mid 90ies.

We have two new positions, a PhD and a Post doc at #InstituteofBiologyLeiden within our @microclockerc.bsky.social #ERCSyG project to discover interaction of #circadianclocks between Bacillus subtilis and Arabidopsis please share these with your network! 🙏 links below👇 [1/3]

Any friends going to ASM Microbe? Let me know so we can catch up!!

LAB NEWS: Our lab hammock gets a special shout out! 🤣

Tweeps, please spread the word. We're still looking at recruiting a structural biologist (any level) to study plant-pathogen protein complexes especially in the context of coevolution. Direct inquiries welcome. Please include a cover letter. Applicant from US welcome? medium.com/@kamounlab/2...

Abundance measurements reveal the balance between lysis and lysogeny in the human gut microbiome -in @currentbiology.bsky.social from Benjamin H. Good, K.C. Huang www.cell.com/current-biol...

Biofilm architecture determines the dissemination of conjugative plasmids: We measured the spatiotemporal spread of plasmids in biofilms and found that plasmids only spread in some biofilm regions! Collab with lab of @sbigot.bsky.social & Christian Lesterlin www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share that our story on S. aureus antagonism by Malassezia is live today in Current Biology! The paper has changed a lot since the preprint with the very exciting addition of having identified the antimicrobial effector generated by M. sympodialis. authors.elsevier.com/c/1kwzj3QW8S...

Microbiome folks: what's your favorite fecal gDNA extraction kit? Looking for something that will also retrieve very small and very large plasmids.

OUT NOW: Inducible transposon mutagenesis identifies bacterial fitness determinants during infection in mice #microsky 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

... and finally the paper is out on microbial genomics! www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

DNA-utilization loci enable exogenous DNA metabolism in gut Bacteroidales https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.18.642099v1

Telomeric transposons are pervasive in linear bacterial genomes | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It’s not every day one gets to publish an article with NASA astronauts. This journey started in 2019 and withe the goal to understand the microbial and chemical make-up of the space station. We had lots of experience with analysis from swabs on earth.

It is finally out! Muntathar Al-Shimary, @doudna-lab.bsky.social , @cresslab.bsky.social and I present a gene knockdown tool that works in diverse bacteriophages: CRISPRi through antisense RNA Targeting (CRISPRi-ART)! Check it out @naturemicrobiol.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Applications to join our lab as a SRA I (tech-equivalent) still open! Ideal for a recent graduate with a bachelor’s degree & research experience, who is interested in working in a supportive lab for ~2 years before pursuing an advanced degree. Apply before app closes this Friday 2/28

I just posted "Some Experiments Work, and Some Don't." It features this new paper from Paul Rainey's group, along with a *failed* experiment that Paul Sniegowski and I ran in the 1990s trying to test the same idea. telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2025/02/21/s...

Two (!) perspective pieces published today involving people from our lab! @adelpanta.bsky.social on spatial patterning in microbial communities www.nature.com/articles/s41... and @salazarafra.bsky.social on microbial communities as evolutionary individuals www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Experimental evolution of evolvability | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New mechanism of gene transfer! With @tcostalab.bsky.social @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social, we discovered that cf-PICIs form tail-less elements that, once released, spread among different bacterial species by hijacking tails from various phages. More exciting news soon! shorturl.at/kRJqE

All of this is true. The potential damage is almost unimaginable.

This paper has been a long time coming: We looked at the genomes of historical bacterial samples over a century to look for trends of antibiotic resistance genes, finding multiple instances of them in infections before the age of antibiotics, but an increase in both frequency and mobility after

People sometimes make fun of science that sounds stupid and random. Meanwhile, a study of lizard saliva turned into a peptide medication, which was turned into a diabetes medication, which was turned into a GLP1 weight loss drug, that just became the first therapy every approved for … sleep apnea

I agree, and often it is the double whammy of the deadlines being announced at quite short notice too. Maybe some people can drop all other work and home commitments, I dunno.

WHY do we have so many deadlines in early January? Why do Orgs in countries that overwhelmingly celebrate Christmas do this? These deadlines aren't natural phenomena - we are in control of this!! We don't we just... not? And let everyone have a genuine break? 🤔🙃

Check out this thread on the latest work from our lab, led by @emilykibby.bsky.social ! Here we used the power of computationally predicting protein-protein interactions to understand how a bacterial antiphage system senses infection.

It's time 🙃!! The soon-to-be-open Bomba-Warczak Lab at UPenn is HIRING postdocs! If you're interested in mitochondria, proteomics, neurons and/or oocytes, and want to join a young & vibrant lab in a vibrant city - apply 👉 www.bombawarczaklab.com/people/now-h... #TeamMassSpec #mitochondria

For every $1 of NIH funding generated approximately $2.64 of economic activity. For every $100 million of funding, the patents created generate an estimated $598 million in further R&D. NIH-funded patents represent significant advances and produce 20% more economic value than other patents.

Keeping your symbiosis genes on a plasmid is a smart move if you have multiple potential hosts. Here a gut bacterial symbiont, but same is true for N-fixing Rhizobia. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

To honour Abigail A. Salyers (1942-2013), who is considered as the mother of microbiome research, DSMZ researchers named the strain Streptomyces salyersiae (DSM 41770) after her. #WomenInScience #antibiotics #antibioticresistance #microbiome #microbiology

We're hiring a gnotobiotic mouse specialist! This person will maintain our germ-free mouse colony and manage gnotobiotic operations in the lab. phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDRn8Seh

First post on a lovely story from the lab that shows that Faecalibacterium prausnitzii can package its own genome in bite-size segments in phage-like capsids www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Exciting times! Our latest preprint is now live 🤩! After nearly 16 yrs of running my lab, I truly believe this is one of the most significant contributions we've made. It offers fresh hypotheses about how pandemic Vibrio cholerae spreads globally. Let’s dive in!🧵..1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Diversity-generating retroelements for the win!

Hi friends new and old! I study how microbes interact and evolve in complex communities like the human gut microbiome.🦠🧬💩 I'm thrilled to share that I'm starting a lab at UC Irvine in April 2025 and am recruiting at all levels - please spread the word! kxuelab.com More about my work below...🧵1/n