Preprint on the permeability of Gram+ bacterial cell wall from a few months ago. Intriguing findings, elegant methodology. Cell wall is largely impermeable to molecule sizes of mNeonGreen (27kDa) and above. How do larger secreted proteins get through? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #microsky

a daring approach: looking at LUCA's ancestors, i.e. pre-darwinian evolution. but not surprising it's coming from @kacarlab.bsky.social 👏 glad to see Iwabe et al. (1989) among the references (blew my mind when it came out >30 y ago)

Seema Mattoo on Bordetella pertussis and whooping cough! Matters Microbial, @mattoolab.bsky.social @markowenmartin.bsky.social #MicroSky

@poojag96.bsky.social work on the bioenergetics of spore germination is now published- Pooja had a really nice summary that I've put below but essentially we think the role of bioenergetics in spore germination has been completely overlooked! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Friends, please help spread the word about our microbiology REU program at Montana State University. www.montana.edu/mbi/reu/ Each student receives a stipend ($7000 for 10 wks). Travel compensation, room, and board are also provided. Details in the attached pic--Feb 14 deadline 🧫🧪🦠#microsky

Metabolite toxicity as a driver of bacterial metabolite externalization www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #jcampubs

Metabolic diversity of microorganisms toward atypical sugar enantiomers https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.17.700050v1

Registration to GRC Microbial Stress Response is open! Can't wait!👍 @stallingslab.bsky.social @fredbarras.bsky.social & @anjbadri.bsky.social @laahrs.bsky.social

Valuable data sets are often overlooked because they are difficult to locate. The NIAID Data Ecosystem Discovery Portal provides a centralized, searchable interface that empowers users with varying technical expertise to find and reuse data. #mSystems: asm.social/2Lo

Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earth’s biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Pete Greenberg's view in #JBacteriol: Pseudomonas aeruginosa, my model for research on quorum sensing, biofilms, and opportunistic infections journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Some of the longest-lived organisms on Earth aren’t whales, trees or corals, but microbes buried deep in the earth. This eye-opening essay examines the slowest lives on Earth, asking what such lives mean for how we define life itself @karenlloyd.bsky.social

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

Can’t wait!! My bacterial cell bio friends, you’re gonna want to go to this GRC and GRS.

Absolutely stoked to have this published in @plosbiology.org We looked at the metabolism of #Klebsiella pneumoniae 🦠🧫. We not only demonstrated lineage-specific #metabolism, but that lineages can cross-feed and support each other. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... #MicroSky #microbiology 🧬 🧪 💊

The diderm cell envelope is not a stack of layers but a unified scaffold of Inner Membrane–Peptidoglycan–Outer Membrane. We discuss how tethering the OM to the PG in E. coli preserves integrity — and extend the concept across diderm bacteria. Curr Opin Microbiol: doi.org/10.1016/j.mi... #microsky 🔬

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026! The Microbial Ecosystems Lab @hot-mes-asu.bsky.social at ASU studies microbial interactions, spatial ecology, and imaging-driven microbiome science. If you love microbes, microfluidics, or single-cell analysis, let’s talk! www.microbialeco.systems

Essential reading if you care about the health of scientific inquiry in the US www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Each such discovery is a game changer for our understanding of eukaryote evolution, and this paper is no exception. Meet Solarion, which displays yet again novel types of subcellular structures. Congrats to all authors on a fascinating story. #protistsonsky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Introducing ** Incendiamoeba **, a eukaryote that can live at temperatures well beyond what we thought possible. 63C!! Read @hbrappap.bsky.social thread to see what we’ve already started to learn from this amazing organism! doi.org/10.1101/2025... #MicroSky #protistsonsky 🧪 #evobio

Very happy to share our work on lipopolysaccharide assembly by the Lpt complex, published today in @natcomms.nature.com Fantastic collaboration with @raffaeleieva.bsky.social l and t @pstansfeld.bsky.social Congrats to all authors, especially Haoxiang, Axel & Violette 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s414...

New release of the TrackMate single particle tracking plugin for ImageJ by @jytinevez.bsky.social looks amazing! forum.image.sc/t/trackmate-... Loads of new features, most excitingly to me deep learning segmentation algorithms including Omnipose (for cells), and Spotiflow (for spots) #bioimaging

Weird word of the day: "kleptosquamy." The testate amoeba Awerintzewia cyclostoma steals scales from other amoeboid organisms to build its own shell. This one has robbed Quadrulella, Netzelia, various euglyphids, and even an Acanthocystis. Kleptosquamy! #amoebae #ProtistsOnSky #biology #nature

Fluorescein-based dyes are not valid reporters of oxidative stress in bacteria, and conclusions based on their use must be reconsidered | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Resolution limits attmepts to deconvolute spatial transcriptomics & estimate cellular composition. This study presents Cell2Spatial, which maps #scRNAseq data to #SpatialTranscriptomics spots, facilitating precise reconstruction of tissue architecture @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/47MhTvl

Prashant Singh in the lab of Tina Iverson at Vanderbilt published this image of the bacterial 🦠flagellar motor, a detailed molecular model made possibly by CryoEM 🔬. The similarity to mechanical motors are strong enough we can use terms like stator, rotor, rod & gearing to describe it.

Happy to share our latest T6SS review: nature.com/articles/s41... Thank you, Jan, Danny (@dannyjamesward.bsky.social), Joana (@joanampereira.bsky.social), as well as reviewers and editors @natrevmicro.nature.com!

In muddy sediments all over the world, tiny bacteria eat and grow by building electrically conducting wires into the muck. Now, researchers say they have discovered how these miniature electricians, known as cable bacteria, do it. https://scim.ag/4i2s2Yu

We're just 6 months away from @keystoneSymposia.bsky.social Beyond #Antibiotics : Emerging Strategies Combating #BacterialInfection, May 2026 in Breckenridge! 👉Scholarship and short talk abstract deadlines are Jan 7! 🧐 keysym.us/KSBeyondAntibiotics26 #KSBeyondAntibiotics26

Ray: Just a note to say STC is officially back up and running!! You can view our new home via smallthingsconsidered.blog

“Cellular Olympics” our catalog of freeky ultra fast cellular superhero’s is freely available “Ann Rev of microbiology” www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... This is a compilation of world’s fastest single cell organisms - enjoy this buffet of rare delightful protists with mind bending speeds. 🧪

Holy moly

Job alert ‼️ UChicago Micro is hiring! Open to tenured/tenure track faculty at all levels in any area of microbiology. Come join our amazing and growing department. apply.interfolio.com/174404

New in JB: Déraspe, Roy et al. perform a comparative genomics study of the PA7-clade of P. aeruginosa - now recognized as a distinct species, Pseudomonas paraeruginosa. This analysis revealed 2 sub-clades, the lack of T3SS & multiresistance. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @asm.org #JBacteriology

DYK most P. aeruginosa carry filamentous phage(s) that don't need to kill the cell to reproduce? We 👉🏻@nanamikubota.bsky.social show that these Pf phages can go ROGUE. "Filamentous cheater phages drive bacterial and phage populations to lower fitness" 🔗 authors.elsevier.com/c/1lt5I3QW8S...

Metabolic response of a chemolithoautotrophic archaeon to carbon limitation journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.... #jcampubs

View from the lab now. Did I mention that we are recruiting faculty microbiologists? www.linkedin.com/posts/vaughn...

New in JB: In this minireview, Rotaru, Kotoky et al. explore the Kotoky review the surface biology of Methanosarcina, an archaeon, with respect to their EET strategies, and biogeochemical and industrial roles. Some cool biology! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @asm.org #JBacteriology

There seems to quite a few new faces lately, so if I haven’t already added you, but you’d like added please let me know and for anyone interested in following more microbial natural products folks, then our starter pack is now 100 strong go.bsky.app/72NeGsT

PhD fellowship in biofilm-phage interactions - with Mette Burmølle at University of Copenhagen 🇩🇰 deadline 1 October 2025 employment.ku.dk/faculty?show... #phagesky #microsky

Microbiologist Paula Welander studies fossils, but not dinosaur bones or ammonite imprints. Instead, she looks for microscopic clues left behind by microbes that lived millions of years ago.

🚨 Microbiologists! We are recruiting Assistant / Associate Professors in 3 collaborative areas of our U. Pittsburgh School of Medicine. 1) MMG (my dept): fundamental research in med micro 2) Peds ID / I4Kids institute 3) Center for Vaccine Research 🔗 to all 3 w/info: www.linkedin.com/posts/vaughn...

A molecular-resolution look into the near-native architecture of the spinach chloroplast🌱. This one was a long time in the oven, but we're happy to finally share our "version of record". What long-standing debates did we settle? Check back for a short thread🧵 on Monday. #TeamTomo #PlantScience 🧪🧶🧬🔬🌾

"Sleep, like aging, may be an inescapable consequence of aerobic metabolism." Really enjoyed this thought-provoking paper 🧠💤🪰 - congrats to @rafsarnataro.bsky.social and team on this impressive work! No wonder the Krebs cycle always put me to sleep 😅 #neuroskyence

mGem: Revisiting bacterial overflow metabolism | in mBio 🫴 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @mbio.bsky.social

schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2... #MicroSky

We are hiring! The Dept of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics is looking for faculty at the Assistant or Associate professor level (tenure track). Please consider joining our vibrant microbiology and immunology community at the University of Pittsburgh School of medicine

🚨 Imagine a bacterium that refuses to follow the textbook: It grows as tangled filaments, divides unevenly, reshapes its own membranes… and even builds grappling hooks. Meet Litorilinea aerophila — and here’s why it blew our minds.

Just published the first chapter of my thesis! 🥰 E. coli regulates the levels of a translation release factor (RF2) via a *purposeful* frameshift during translation. We found that most other bacteria do this too and it's likely an ancient mechanism! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Latest from the lab! Analysis of everyone’s favorite regulatory mechanism in bacteria — the RF2 programmed frameshift! Likely present in the ancestor of bacteria, use of this mechanism is influenced by stop codon usage! Big congrats to @cassidyprints.bsky.social journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...