Our work on the Panoptes antiphage system is published! Here we find that Panoptes "watches" the cytosol for phage immune evasion proteins–captured in this illustration by Clair Huffine of Insight Illustrations. A beautiful example of the effector triggered immunity paradigm.

A little late to the Panoptes party, but I’m delighted to share that our paper is published! 👁️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My pleasure @erinedoherty.bsky.social and @benmorehouse.bsky.social - for me this was the stand-out discovery of the last year in the field

Are viruses capable of regulating protein synthesis in the nuanced way of cellular organisms? Kinda! I’m excited to share some of my postdoc work that leveraged giant DNA viruses to address this question.

Our story describing the Panoptes bacterial immune defense system is now finally peer-reviewed and published today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The NSF GRFP is now limited to undergrads and first-year grads drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/t...

You’ve heard of ubiquitination, meet deazaguanylation: Doug Wassarman in our lab discovered phage defense pathways have co-opted Q nucleobase biosynthetic enzymes to catalyze a new form of protein conjugation chemistry @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Looking for a new approach to studying or eliminating phages? Check out our study introducing anti-phage ASOs (antisense oligos) out in @Nature today. nature.com/articles/s4158…

A new theme issue of #PhilTransB examines the evolutionary history of bacterial immune systems, their modes of action, and the patterns how different bacterial immune systems are distributed across different ecosystems. Read: buff.ly/Z4qdxY1

Preprint: De-novo design of proteins that inhibit bacterial defenses Our approach allows silencing defense systems of choice. We show how this approach enables programming of “untransformable” bacteria, and how it can enhance phage therapy applications Congrats Jeremy Garb! tinyurl.com/Syttt 🧵

📢 New preprint alert! We designed synthetic proteins that can block bacterial immune systems, allowing phages + plasmids to overcome natural defenses. This could transform phage therapy + genetic engineering. Here’s what we found 🧵 Preprint🔗: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📢 Preprint out! Together with @reneechang.bsky.social @kranzuschlab.bsky.social and the amazing @soreklab.bsky.social, we explored viral sponges to map their diversity and function. Discovered huge diversity, including sponges that inhibit Pycsar & Type IV Thoeris! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The beautiful, ever-expanding universe of viral proteins targeting nucleotide immune signals! Paper by @reneechang.bsky.social in @cp-molcell.bsky.social on a nucleotide sponge www.cell.com/molecular-ce... and preprint by @doudna-lab.bsky.social on viral nucleases www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share my PhD work in the @kranzuschlab.bsky.social, out now in Molecular Cell @cp-molcell.bsky.social We discover Acb4, a new family of viral sponges that sequesters nucleotide immune signals and defines molecular features that enable ligand specificity. www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Excited to share our new preprint co-led by @jnoms.bsky.social! Here we reveal an exceptional diversity of viral 2H phosphodiesterases (PDEs) that enable immune evasion by selectively degrading oligonucleotide-based messengers. This 2H PDE fold has evolved striking substrate breath & specificity.

Read the adjoining research paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#News&Views Bacterial prions form amyloids in response to phage infection and induce cell death to prevent viral replication, similar to the processes in fungi and across the tree of life. #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very interesting work from Ibarlosa and colleagues regarding functional amyloid forming proteins in prokaryotic immunity. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Check out our News & Views summary of the work as well! rdcu.be/eBHxh

1/ Excited to share the first preprint from my lab! 🎉 My postdoc Paz asked how cholera toxin (CT) helps Vibrio cholerae thrive in the gut. Turns out, CT rewires epithelial metabolism toward L-lactate production—fueling pathogen growth in the small intestine during disease

Read my review with @soreklab.bsky.social on the nucleotide pool as a central playground in antiviral immunity across humans, bacteria and plants! 🧍‍♀️🦠🌿 & how viruses overcome these nucleotide-based immune mechanisms 🗡️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First preprint from the Nemudryi Lab! 🍾 In this work, we link antiviral immunity in bacteria and humans by showing that homologs of human Schlafen nucleases protect bacteria from phages. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🦠🧍‍♀️From bacterial to human immunity. We report in @science.org the discovery of a human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins that participates in the TLR pathway of animal innate immunity. Co-led wt @enzopoirier.bsky.social by D. Bonhomme and @hugovaysset.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We are excited to have our new paper out: Tethering of the pathogen sensor caspase-4 to the endomembrane damage sensor galectin-8 poises the host to rapidly detect pathogens that breach the endolysosomal network. www.cell.com/cell-reports... #innate_immunity #inflammasome #celldeath #immunoSky 1/2

Starting the lab Bluesky account to share a preprint from @aragucci.bsky.social and @sadieantine.bsky.social‬ that reveals molecular principles shared across diverse nuclease-NTPase anti-phage defense systems in bacterial immunity (1/7) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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

A new preprint led by Sonomi Yamaguchi in our lab describes a bacterial anti-phage defense system named Clover that uses nucleotide signals to both activate and inhibit host immunity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Here we show how the type III signalling molecule SAM-AMP is bound and degraded by a specialised lyase enzyme encoded in cellular and phage genomes. More great work by @haotianchi.bsky.social and the team. @uniofstandrews.bsky.social academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

📢Preprint out! Excited to share my final work from the @soreklab.bsky.social! We mined phage dark matter using structural features shared by anti-defense proteins (viral tools that help phages bypass bacterial immunity) to guide discovery. Found 3 new families targeting immune signaling!

I am delighted to share that my work in the @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social lab is now on bioRxiv! We used a large-scale genetic screen to begin defining the vast landscape of phage proteins that trigger immune signaling in bacteria. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share our editorial on peer review, out now in #mBio! This was a mighty group effort with my mBio Early Career Editorial Board peer mentoring group @proctordm.bsky.social and Rachy Abraham. From novice to expert: preparing your peer review | mBio journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Excited to share that my work in the @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social lab describing chaperone-mediated phage sensing by a bacterial NLR-related protein is out in @plosbiology.org!

Today I was honored to receive the UC Irvine Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Fostering of Undergraduate Research- but it's really about them. I'm proud of the team we've built here over the last 2.5 years. So many excellent undergrads!!!

"Phollow" the link to our May issue to read about... 💥lysing bacterial pathogens ⛽microbial alkane oxidation 🌱importance of seed-borne bacteria 🙅‍♀️protective antibodies for norovirus 🚰E. coli in urban drinking water ...and more!👇 www.nature.com/nmicrobiol/v...

Excited to share my PhD work in the Kranzusch Lab published in @nature.com! Two key discoveries: - Nucleotides can act as negative regulators of antiviral immunity - Ion channel activation is gated by DNA Thank you to our all collaborators! @soreklab.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Out in Nature today: A new immune signaling molecule, His-ADPR, is produced by defensive TIR domain proteins in bacteria to protect from phage Joint work with the Tamulaitienė and Kranzusch labs www.nature.com/articles/s41... Congrats Carmel Avraham, Dziugas Sabonis, Renee Chang and co-authors!

I am thrilled to share the first manuscript from the Wiles lab! We present "Phollow", an in vivo phage-tagging approach that enables direct observation of phage outbreaks with single-virion resolution by live imaging. Here some highlights 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It was an honor for my lab and myself to host the meeting on the Immune Systems of Bacteria. Such a high from all the incredible science and sharing with scientists from the whole world the greatness of Paris in the spring. Vive la science, et vive Paris!

CBASS, CRISPR, and mCpol- oh my! What a satisfying collaboration with @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social 's lab- we uncovered a new cyclic dinucleotide signaling pathway, but it doesn't work how you'd expect! Check out the thread from @aesully98.bsky.social for an overview of the most important findings!

Hello BlueSky! Inaugural post here from the Sternberg Lab. We're excited to share our latest work, in which we teamed up with the @WiedenheftLab to study how DRT9 reverse transcriptases provide antiviral immunity. Here’s what we found: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What happens if you introduce 🦠vs 🦠🦠🦠 into a microbial community? Are larger microbial populations more likely to establish? Check out new work led by @goldmandoran.bsky.social that used experiments and theory to dive deep into this simple question. ⬇️ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

My lab’s first preprint! We used functional metagenomics to identify phage defenses in human and soil microbiomes. We scaled these selections while maintaining accuracy, enabling us to examine 9 habitats for defense elements against 7 phages. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/10

Our #CryoEM study on the binding of a Tarantula toxin to a full-length human voltage-gated sodium channel has been published. Very proud of the awesome people in my lab 🥳🥂 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm thrilled to announce our latest work is now published in Cell! Viruses encode numerous proteins that inhibit host defenses, but identifying immune-modulatory proteins among millions of viral sequences has been nearly impossible - until now! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

🧬 Save the date! The EMBO Workshop "The Immune System of Bacteria" will uncover groundbreaking insights into bacterial defense systems. Join us April 8-10, 2025, at Institut Pasteur, Paris. Submit your abstracts by Feb. 28 👉 https://www.sisb2025.conferences-pasteur.org/home

Get those abstracts submitted by Jan 22nd! ASM Microbe is in L.A. this year and I look forward to convening and speaking in the “Who Runs the World? Phage” in-depth session in the MBP track focused on antiphage immunity and phage counter defense. asm.org/Events/ASM-M...

What is the diversity of antiphage systems out there ? We used protein and genomic language models (and defense score!) to start bringing some answers: >45 000 protein families. Leb by E. Mordret. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Interactive UMAP to have fun mdmparis.github.io/antiphage-la...

What a great way to end the year! ✨ Today in @cellpress.bsky.social we report the structure and function of the Shedu anti-phage defense system. tinyurl.com/4crj6dnx A long 🧵...

So excited to have our new paper out now! Pyroptotic EVs “transplant” gasdermin pores from dying cells onto bystander cells, propagating pyroptosis and inflammation. t.co/XgU6jt15aF 1/3 #innate_immunity #immunoSky #celldeath #ExtracellularVesicles @uconnresearch.bsky.social

Excited to share that my graduate work is up on bioRxiv! I found that some SPβ-like phages of B. subtilis have a counter-defense system that inhibits NADase activity from the SpbK anti-phage defense during phage infection and activation of SpbK.

I’m so excited to share that some of my grad work in the @aaronwhiteley lab is now available on bioRxiv! We used an AlphaFold-multimer screen to uncover how a bacterial NLR-related proteins senses multiple phage-encoded proteins to confer phage protection. Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...