Big week: welcomed a new baby boy Harris Lopatkin, AND our PlasAnn paper is finally out: academic.oup.com/nar/article/... (obviously the first more important than the second 🥰). Currently on leave but if anyone has the need to annotate large plasmids, go check it out!

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

How sad. Losing public trust in mRNA vaccines should spark massive education efforts to rebuild understanding - not abandonment of genuinely good technology.

If you ever find yourself needing evidence for ‘Plasmids are just as common in microbes without resistance genes,’ we’ve got you covered! Check our new paper, out today: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Why does ppt always refuse to let me draw a straight line at the times I need it most 😞

First official Master from the lab 🥰 congrats Yuchang!!!!

🚨🚨New paper out in @natcomms.nature.com!! Come for the first large-scale analysis of plasmid copy number across species, stay for one of the most intriguing results of my lab: universal scaling laws in plasmid biology! 📈🧬 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very excited for my first microbial population biology GRC!!

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

New review out in @NatureRevMicro on the complex rltnshp btween metabolism & AMR! A true labor of love from previous postbac Mehrose, grad students Varun & Zirui, and collaborator @drrobsmith.bsky.social (plus figures I'll likely use for many talks to come 😊) rdcu.be/eaES2

It’s official. Twitter is (mostly) a cesspool of bots.

Favorite 3D printer cad software for the lab?

Very happy to see this work published! We unveil a plasmid-chromosome crosstalk by showing that pOXA-48 encodes for a regulator that mediates the transcription of an enterobacterial chromosomal operon, resulting in a growth benefit for the plasmid-carrying bacteria! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Incredible graphic - the myriad of ways that bacteria defend themselves against antibiotics. 14 resistance mechanisms, summarised by Idan Yelin & Roy Kishony in Cell www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Can someone please standardize graduate school recommendation letter submission portals so I don’t need to make 5 different accounts and give slightly different answers to very similar questions

We should’ve moved here years ago

Please consider attending the 2025 ASM Microbe meeting! I will be talking about Tn7 and Tn7-like elements as a "Track Hub" talk and it would be great to see you there! asm.org/events/asm-m...

Mobile Elements Starter Pack on BlueSky! Interested in plasmids, phages, ICEs, transposons, integrons, and all things accessory genome? Follow this curated list of researchers and labs doing exciting work in mobile elements.

Thank you for the continued support of my lab through purchasing my rainbow plasmids! Just paid for primers to isolate a putative blue gene from our #BlueSoup microbe. Excited to get some cloning done with @bielleogy.bsky.social If anyone wants 🌈🦠, fresh stabs at atinygreencell.com

Directed evolution of engineered virus-like particles with improved production and transduction efficiencies https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02467-x 🧬🖥️🧪

Addgene reposting our review feels like a real milestone for me in a very nerdy niche way 😅😊

Plasmids are commonly viewed as burdensome. But maybe this burden can be advantageous? Check out this new review paper from the lab that investigates this further!! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Agreed and also: For a PhD student, choosing a good lab also matters more than the school name 🫣

Any starter packs on syn bio (for bacteria) on here per chance?

Plus side of the impending AI overlord takeover - you no longer have to manually collect google scholar citations. Our amazing masters student Abhishek created a bot to do it for you! We're using it for an ongoing project and you should too: github.com/ajlopatkin/G...

I check this app once every ~6 days when I remember and each time I remind myself to start using it more regularly

I was skeptical but this really feels like Twitter (but dare I say…better?)

Oooh first repost here- gotta be an important one