Beyond AMGs: Phage-encoded transcription and sigma factors as understudied virocell reprogramming tools #phage #phagesky Trends in Microbiology www.cell.com/trends/micro...

How do dangerous bacteria arm themselves before attack? Scientists from NTU-SCELSE and Imperial College London uncovered a previously unknown mechanism showing how bacteria load toxins into a microscopic weapon system before firing. Nature Microbiology-> rdcu.be/fk0Bq @fillouxlab.bsky.social

Great EMBO YIP @embo.org lecture by Teresa Thurston @thurstonlab.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk at "Pathogen Immunity and Signalling" #EMBOpathogenSignalling. Bacterial effectors mediate kinase reprogramming through mimicry of conserved eukaryotic motifs. See also: -> link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Hate to see this happening, but it's a common thing now with all Frontiers journals. Time to stop publishing there people!!! Please read the full thread!

Phage therapy via receptor-constrained evolutionary traps: Trends in Microbiology www.cell.com/trends/micro... #phage #phagesky

Our paper is now published in eBioMedicine and I'm genuinely thrilled it's out 🎉 🧵 www.thelancet.com/journals/EBI... Despite the fact that this is a 2026 paper (such is peer review!), I wanted to write something and take you back to 2023, where the story of this work began. (1/7)

Monsanto has a patent on glyphosate as an antimicrobial. That explains its deadly impact on our microbiome. scottcanderson.substack.com/p/the-shocki...

Read the short highlight commentary I wrote with @enningalab.bsky.social for @molecularmicro.bsky.social about the latest story by the Humphreys lab onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... ISG15 and toxins doing cool things during! #Salmonella

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

"An email from NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to research-center grantees, seen by Science, requires their institutions to promise that U.S. authors of papers NIH has flagged because of foreign co-authors will not collaborate with them in the future."

There’s a LOT going on as researchers and public health experts race to respond to the Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak in DRC and Uganda before it grows bigger. Some really important questions still open, but also a few answers coming into view🧪 My overview in @science.org is here (and thread coming):

As @statnews.com reported yesterday, several Americans in DRC had high-risk exposures to #Ebola in the latest outbreak. One has tested positive. These individuals are being flown to Germany for observation and treatment as needed. www.statnews.com/2026/05/18/c...

BBSRC Early Independence Fellowships had an Outline stage this year to try help with amount of peer review. Turns out they received 586 applications, a 110% increase on 2025, and only typically fund 15 a year. They are cancelling this stage and going straight to full app with an institutional sift.

Pathogen genomics is increasingly being implemented in clinical microbiology. Discover the factors that represent barriers to, and potential enablers of, this implementation, including the availability of funding and genomics-trained staff. #ClinMicroRev: asm.social/2VH

Peer reviewed studies showing good safety of the covid and shingles vaccines looking at millions of people were suppressed from being public and published because under RFKJr , HHS is pursuing an anti vaccine agenda

Congratulations Valerie Mizrahi valmizrahi.bsky.social 🦠 🧪 #WomenInStem #TB www.nasonline.org/news/2026-na...

Hello world, what on earth going on with bluesky right now?! In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of me riding an E. coli in LB broth (not to scale). I drew it as my bio pic for Upfest - I'm taking part in Europe's largest graffiti festival this year! #microsky #sciart #science #scicomm

Bacteria have been fighting off viruses using a huge arsenal of molecular weaponry that scientists did not know about — until now. Researchers have identified proteins that could lead to virus-fighting drugs and technologies. go.nature.com/4dqQnXI

Dissecting host stress responses for predictable heterologous gene expression in E. coli url: academic.oup.com/nar/article/... #microsky

Genome sequence of a 5,000 year old bacterium (Psychrobacter) from cave ice contains more than 100 genes associated with antimicrobial resistance 😳 www.frontiersin.org/journals/mic...

📣Huge preprint 🔔 Today we share something our group has been working toward for a long time, led by @lucasmoriniere.bsky.social We asked can we predict which receptor a phage targets from its genome sequence alone? For most phages, we couldn’t. So Lucas set out to do something I had only dreamed of.

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Biological AI to interpret and generate DNA, RNA, proteins and cellular systems

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Phages drive the dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes by facilitating host adaptation to heavy metal stress #phage #phagesky

The list of new (2026) elected members of the @femsmicro.org European Academy of Microbiology is out 👏 Congrats to the newcomers, most of them very well-known names incl many friends & close colleagues 😀 fems-microbiology.org/european-aca...

Great time in Segovia with Jay Hinton—one of my favourite microbiology colleagues. The castle of the background (El Alcazar) hosted the first chemistry lab in Spain in the XVIII century. While working there, Joseph Proust discovered the Law of Definite Proportions that every Chemistry student knows

Does an imbalanced gut microbiome worsen chronic kidney disease? By elucidating the ecological causes for changes in the gut microbiota composition and its consequences for disease progression we were able to answer this question. Read more at: www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

📰 𝐉𝐎𝐈𝐍𝐓 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐨𝐧 𝐔𝐊 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐄𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐀𝐟𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧, 𝐌𝐲𝐚𝐧𝐦𝐚𝐫, 𝐒𝐮𝐝𝐚𝐧, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐧

95 new Fellows join the European Academy of Microbiology 🔬 The newly elected Fellows represent a wide range of expertise across microbiology and related disciplines , spanning institutions across Europe and beyond. Read the full announcement📄https://buff.ly/CdRK14U

The complete set of nucleobases found in terrestrial DNA and RNA — adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil — have been detected in samples returned from the asteroid Ryugu, according to research in Nature Astronomy. go.nature.com/3P9A9YN 🔭 🧪

New personal view article The diagnostic void: how #typhoid -by-default drives antimicrobial resistance in Ethiopia www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... #IDSky #ClinMicro #AMR #Salmonella #OpenAccess #OA

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #phage #phagesky

🦠 “𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗶𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝘀 — 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘄?” Historian @kirchhelle.bsky.social chats with 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗮 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗲 & 𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗘𝗯𝗱𝗲𝗻 about revival of phage biology & phage therapy as antibiotics fail. 🎧 2024 BBC Radio 4 — listen worldwide: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... #phage #phagesky #microsky

😓😢 Sabotaging the NSF fellowship is a blunder | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

😮👀 The metabolome of an E. coli CRISPRi library identifies benefits of minimal metabolite levels and targets for engineering: Cell Systems www.cell.com/cell-systems...

Almost all of the scientists were previously at US institutions go.nature.com/4qMlrUR

Join us for our 2nd Aerosols and Microbiology: Bridging disciplines to advance health & environmental sustainability meeting. 📅Date: 9–11 June 2026 📍 Location: Leeds Marriott Hotel, UK Register your place: https://microb.io/Aerosols2026 #Microbiology #Conference #Health #Research

Don’t deprioritize curiosity-driven research www.nature.com/articles/d41...

By my count, this is the third CDC outbreak notice in the past three months involving Moringa leaf and various Salmonella strains. What's with that?

Are you interested in being the first biologist in our new team? Come join our small but growing group. Deadline for applications is 3rd March. #Tuberculosis 🧪🦠 #TBDrugDiscovery

Congratulations to Mariana Byndloss @maribyndloss.bsky.social for her promotion to Associate Professor with tenure at Vanderbilt University @vanderbilt.edu Photo credit: Bäumler lab archives

So happy to see this story out! Incredible work on systematically standardizing a good cellular model for iNTS-macrophage interactions, which clearly shows how different Salmonella pathovariants are in terms of intracellular behaviour! @jayhinton.bsky.social

Bloodstream-associated Salmonella Typhimurium and Enteritidis iNTS pathovariants hyper-replicate in human macrophages https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.28.702237v1

😢 this is seriously unfortunate. Many places, same story. www.cpr.org/2026/02/09/n...

Congratulations to Çagla Tükel @caglatukel.bsky.social for her election to fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology! asm.social/2OC

CHECK IT OUT 🦠👀 Very cool article by science journalist Carrie Arnold reviewing recent research from leading laboratories on how the unique shape of a microbial #biofilm emerges from interactions of its component microbes with each other and their environment www.quantamagazine.org/how-a-biofil...

#NewResearch Diverse genomes of lytic phages are found in bacterial assemblies, challenging assumptions about the nature of the lytic lifestyle. #MicroSky 🦠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#NewResearch The long-term existence of diverse virulent phages within cultures of Escherichia coli and others challenges the virulent–temperate dichotomy and points to non-canonical phage lifestyles. #MicroSky 🦠 @peterdoug.bsky.social @emggroupucph.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Friday we lost a brilliant mind, colleague, and friend to her battle with pancreatic cancer. Those who knew her will remember Helene Andrews-Polymenis for her warmth, generosity and leadership. She will be missed by many. RIP