We are hiring! If you're interested in exploring the #biogeography of #prokaryotes using #genomics and #metagenomics, are interested in biology and geographic information systems, and are passionate about #OpenScience, this is for you! New PhD and PostDoc positions in my lab at Aalborg University

I know I'm probably using this function all wrong but Gaia/Seqhub really made me cackle today. For your own viewing pleasure, a story in screengrabs 🤣🫣🤖

Fascinating study! A pathogen locked in an evolutionary trade-off with strain antagonism for centuries and HGT has not caused escaping it 🤔

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨Preprint alert - this is a big one! We transfer the revolutionary power of TnSeq to bacteriophages. Our HIDEN-SEQ links the "dark matter" genes of your favorite phage to any selectable phenotype, guiding the path from fun observations to molecular mechanisms. A thread 1/8

Nutrient competition predicts gut microbiome restructuring under drug perturbations @cellcellpress.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... @stanforduniversity.bsky.social

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

The Leading Edge community has been a life-line as I navigate *points to everything*. Zara was such a shining light of wisdom and warmth. She will be sorely missed, but her legacy will continue in everyone who had the utmost privilege to interact with her. Apply, apply, apply!!!!

Being a leading edge fellow has been the single best thing for my scientific career. Zara’s voice and vision was no small part in that. Apply. Apply. Apply.

Zara Weinberg was a brilliant light both in and out of science. She changed the lives of everyone she interacted and loved for the better. Her legacy will live on through all of us and we will fight for a better world on behalf of her memory.

May we fight each day to build the future Zara imagined. The world lost a genuinely good human but her power to inspire our community will persist 💔

New pre-print www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Plasmid-dependent phage (PDPs) are ubiquitous, but the selective pressures that they impose on plasmids are not well understood. Project led by Daniel Cazares in collaboration with @brockhurstlab.bsky.social! #phagesky#microsky

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