Arguably, the most important card in my TM expansion will replace the “Archaebacteria” card in the original game.

This single author paper has to be seen to be believed.... My 'GIF' does it no justice Chen, M. (2023) ‘Rendering protein structures inside cells at the atomic level with Unreal Engine’, bioRxiv. doi.org/10.1101/2023...

Started working on a microbiology - boardgame crossover project. The goal is to have a thematic, scientifically accurate microbiology-theme expansion for my favorite boardgame, Terraforming Mars, later this year.

This blog keeps knocking it out of the park 😆

Awesome work to determine the structure of a freakin 8MDa enzyme complex with over 600 FeS clusters! Sophia won the poster prize at the recent GRC C1 👏 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A microbial mirage: when microbiome metrics may obscure ecological meaning www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... #jcampubs

Excited to see this review paper published! OpenAccess: doi.org/10.1029/2025... We provide an updated view on the applications of archaeal lipids as environmental proxies. Shoutouts to our co-lead authors @climategordon.bsky.social and @lipidorama.bsky.social for spearheading on this.

I will take “things that should have been obvious for 1$”

Scott Atlas, the champion of herd immunity as an Fox News commenter and the Trump Advisor during COVID, weighs in with a DEEPLY MININFORMED op-ed in the WaPo. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202... 1/7

Please welcome @vscooper.micropopbio.org as the new ASM President and Federico Sisti, Ph.D., as President-Elect. They begin their terms on July 1. ASM congratulates its new & continuing leaders and looks forward to their leadership in advancing ASM’s mission. asm.social/2Zx

It's Tuesday! Time for a new episode of #MattersMicrobial! This time, Dr. Hannah Reich joins the #QualityQuorum to discuss phycosymbiosis: how bacteria and algae interact! This was recorded at ASM Microbe. @univpugetsound @ASMicrobiology youtu.be/f6irLu3BWg0?...

📢 We're hiring! The Department of Microbiology & Cell Biology at Montana State University is hiring an Assistant Professor of Microbiology. We welcome applicants working in microbial pathogenesis, immunology, genetics, microbial evolution, and related areas. Apply: jobs.montana.edu/postings/52009

I agree but will put it into stronger words. Using AI colloquially = intellectual laziness.

Microbes that have the greatest genomic potential for secondary metabolism tend to be multicellular. Here, we show that signatures of ancestral BGC expansions within 3 bacterial phyla and 2 fungal lineages coincide with origins of complex multicellularity [1/12] 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

And QED likely is a(nother) scam to make money

Today in “everything AI touches sucks”. Sadly, I had to learn, QED isn’t satire but real.

A travesty. Springer Nature offloads SciAm—the most storied science magazine in the US—onto a content mill consortium, LabX, during an almost certainly successful union vote. LabX now says it will lay off 15 people, over 1/3rd of the unit and 60% of the bargaining committee. Pure union busting.

The lab will have 2 talks and 2 posters at ISME + 2 talks by collaborators/former lab members. Topics are methanogenesis/biogeochemical cycles, method development (Raman), biogeography (Yellowstone hot springs), and new enzymes of thermophiles.

Although this is an (excellent) satire, this is the dystopian future AI companies think they can shove down our throats and some scientists will be good for progress.

For those who believe Europe can absorb researchers from the US, the ERC Advanced Grant competition that just ended will bring nine (9) researchers from the US to Europe from ALL disciplines combined. The US is on its own.

“Just apply more”

NSF's grantmaking is miserly when compared to recent years, but when compared it to the historical record, we see it's a radical break from the long-term consensus of investing in scientific innovation. grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF 🧪

Excited to share our new preprint! 🧬❄️ by brilliant @mdreimann.bsky.social and great collaborators! Using cryo-ET&EM, we reveal archaeal chromatin in a near-native state: variable-beads-on-a-string fibers shaped by growth phase and histone composition #ArchaeaSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wow, great to hear about this course correction! www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/c...

A [Cu-4Fe-4S] cluster? Yep, you read that right! We report a new bioinorganic motif in an acetol dehydrogenase and characterized it with our wonderful collaborators from @ribesresearch.bsky.social @lmu.de @cutsail-lab.bsky.social @ksgchem.bsky.social @mpi-mr.bsky.social @hhu.de 🧪 #chemsky

Isolation of genome-predicted Caldatribacterium (Atribacterota) reveals pervasive microbial cultivation problem due to folate precipitation #microbiology #bacteria #MicroSky @natcomms.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Hmmmm, I am chairing the 2027 AEM GRC 🤔 🤪

Danke an David Rennert & Tanja Traxler von @derstandard.at für die Einladung und die spannenden Fragen! @cemess.bsky.social @univie.ac.at @fwf-at.bsky.social @microbesplanet.bsky.social ' Ich würde mich sehr freuen, wenn ihr reinhört. #MicroSky 🧪

“Nearly half of all Americans did not read a single book in 2025”. JFC. fortune.com/article/gen-...

New paper out in Microbiology Spectrum: “Proteomic stress response by a novel methanogen enriched from the Great Salt Lake”, first author William Christian. We enriched a novel, euryarchaeotal, methyl-dismutating methanogen that grows at 16% salinity. 🦠 #microsky journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

10/10

Archaea the hornets of the microbial world. Discuss. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... TLDR: Archaeon kills bacterium with secreted phospholipase. Pretty nifty way to kill bacteria if you are a microbe with a very different lipid make-up, I reckon. No need to worry about accidentally killing yourself.

Michigan Governor caught on hot mic with Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk, discussing citizen opposition to AI data centers, bragging how she ignores their concerns: “We’re used to people saying 'f*ck no,' & doing it anyway.”🇺🇸

New paper by former postdoc Andrew Montgomery and grad student Sylvia Nupp out in ISME Comm @isme-microbes.bsky.social. Funded by the US NSF. academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

👇

Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship? Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him. Gift link

I'm happy to share the first pre-print of out Lab! 🎉 Introducing ArchaeaHQ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We curated 21,644 genomes across all 4 archaeal kingdoms to bridge the gap in public datasets for computational biology What is inside ArchaeaHQ... (1/2)

I am excited to announce that MSU's Thermal Biology Institute, for which I serve as director since July 2025, is now officially the EXTREME BIOLOGY INSTITUTE (EBI)! 🦠 🔬 Thread below but your TLDR: rebranding ourself the EBI will bring in new research teams, now research directions, and new funds.

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

THE OFFICIAL @standupforscience.net GUIDE FOR TALKING TO ANYONE ABOUT THE OMB RULE PROPOSAL!! www.standupforscience.foundation/policy-and-a...

Even though he died when I was 5 Feynman is a big reason I ever went into science. Reading his anecdotes in high school pushed me the right direction.

Holden Thorp is an institutionalist. He's been a university chancellor, provost, now EiC of Science. When institutionalists pull the fire alarm, we listen, because the call to action he issued this week exposes the dire nature of the threat we are facing. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Russell Vought, Director of the OMB, has issued a set of proposed changes that would dramatically alter federal grant funding. However, we can each take action to prevent these from taking effect. Here's how, a 🧵 🧪 1/n www.science.org/content/arti...

This is very cool!

An interesting breakdown of the cost to produce each article by @embo.org and @embopress.org . Your APC makes scientific societies possible. www.embo.org/features/the...

Publishing a pdf in a society journal (ASM, Microbiology Spectrum) costs $3,060. WTF are we doing people?!

“4. Active Grants Can Be Terminated at Any Time, for Any Reason”

TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data. @sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...