I'm excited to help organize #ICME2026 - join us to explore the latest advances in Microbiome Engineering! Our call for abstract is open and we are seeking sponsors. Please share, and reach out to me to learn more!

“entire 2026 budget” doing some heavy journalistic lifting here. As a large public co, 2026 budgets were probably more or less final pre-Opus 4.5 (maybe even pre-4.1). Very curious what the actual $$ was!

Major vulnerability (hardcoded password, instant access if you know IP address) found in common eppendorf fermentation controller… www.cisa.gov/news-events/...

Our Call for Abstracts for ICME 2026 is now open—please share and consider submitting your work!

Our Call for Abstracts for ICME 2026 is now open—please share and consider submitting your work!

Just released an update of Medusa, a Python package for managing ensembles of genome-scale metabolic models (github.com/opencobra/Me...) This release incorporates improvements by Jeroen Gilis from Chalmers University, including speeding up ensemble generation from a set of SBML files >10X

Michael, this reads as downright conspiratorial. Have you interacted in any way with NSF staff working on this? There’s extensive oversight. No/minimal human subject work is even likely to be funded. There is independent merit-based review. Where are you getting your info?

Looks like a fun microbiome therapeutics event for London-based folks.

Kicking off day 1 of #ksbeyondantibiotics26 with one foot of snow forecasted

Managing microbial interactions in environmental biotechnology: can we scale interaction principles? @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social Review by @wenyugu.bsky.social (EPFL), Xiang-Yi Li Richter, and Dave Johnson at @eawag.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/micro...

The 2025 annual report from @carb-x.bsky.social is available. Check it out to see the critical impact CARB-X is having on development of antimicrobials and preventatives. carb-x.org/about/annual...

Save the date - join the 9th International Conference on Microbiome Engineering! 📍Durham, NC 🗓️ Dec 1-3, 2026 Are you obsessed with controlling microbiomes? Want to learn all the ways accomplishing this goal benefits society? This is the meeting for you! www.aiche.org/sbe/conferen...

Re. Nature today - full story to follow. (hat tip to @rowanwalrath.bsky.social) x.com/pitdesi/stat...

Happy to finally share these results: Cross-feeding enables robust coexistence between four bacterial species www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... With @saramitri.bsky.social @lambdapp.bsky.social @dan1elmachado.bsky.social @lhtxra.bsky.social Eric Ulrich, Alisson Gillon & Sam Testa #microsky

The Anthropic team does lots of helpful posting to X, but unfortunately has not prioritized bluesky cross-posting (makes sense, X algo loves everything AI) @j4ck.xyz made this tool to mirror those accounts, and takes community requests. Boris @bcherny-x.bsky.social Thariq @trq212-x.bsky.social

Trying to reduce my use of social media with algorithmic feeds, and found this very nice bot today. So much of Anthropic’s dev and media teams just post to X as a sole outlet. 2nd best is subscribing to new release notes for Claude code on github.

@ec.europa.eu DG HERA announced a €30 million investment managed by KfW, Germany’s Development Bank, to CARB-X and @gardp.bsky.social to strengthen the global response to AMR. CARB-X will fund early antibacterial research, while GARDP will advance clinical development. #IDSky 🧪 🔗 bit.ly/4v5K81M

Vedanta Biosciences Announces the Phase 3 RESTORATiVE303 Study of VE303 for the Prevention of Recurrent C. difficile Infection Will Continue as Planned Following Protocol-Specified Interim Analysis

This is wild, we eat so much yeast

C. difficile is a terrible condition. Seems like it shouldn't have to be this hard to try to treat a child with a bad case of it. www.statnews.com/2026/03/23/c...

If you're a senior PhD student or recent graduate interested in doing work at the intersection of AI and microbial genomics and/or microbiomes, please feel free to reach out to discuss the possibility of applying together for an MIT Novo Nordisk Fellowship engineering.mit.edu/novo-nordisk

This is your cue to try Claude if you’ve been holding out still…

We're looking to sponsor applications to the new NSF PRFB who are interested in using AI to tackle microbiology's "Great Plate Count Anomaly" Details below. Please share. #microsky #postdoc #AI #microbiology open.substack.com/pub/carinila...

CARB-X is opening a new funding round soon—sign up for their newsletter (link in replies) to get the announcement. CARB-X is one of few organizations making meaningful progress ensuring access to new antimicrobial drugs and supporting preventatives/diagnostics.

Looks interesting

My parking spot today

Tried Edison Analysis (not Kosmos) on two tasks and was blown away: 1. Uploaded 96 high-res NMR spectra of bacterial supernatants and asked for metabolite ID and quantification 2. Uploaded a bacterial genome and asked it to identify mobile genetic elements (more complex, but this is the gist)

Old news by now, but this is a fantastic short course—feels like Andrew Ng’s early coursera neural networks class. If you have not tried Claude Code, I recommend just skimming the videos to see what the chatter is about. www.deeplearning.ai/short-course...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the greatest threats to public health, with the potential to undo decades of medical progress. This #WAAW2025, head to our LinkedIn to hear from world-leading experts on how we can tackle AMR and protect the future of medicine: t.ly/3Oxk1

Registration is now open for @keystonesymposia.bsky.social "Beyond #Antibiotics: Emerging Strategies Combating #BacterialInfection." Deadline for scholarships and abstract selected short talks is Jan 7! Join us this May for an amazing meeting! keysym.us/KSBeyondAntibiotics26 #KSBeyondAntibiotics26

I'll be speaking at Beyond Antibiotics: Emerging Strategies for Combating Bacterial Infection @keystonesymposia.bsky.social May 4-7, 2026. Abstract and scholarship submissions are open through Jan 7. Please encourage those in your network working on novel infection prevention/treatment to submit!

Incredibly powerful story from endocrinologist Dr. Caroline Fox candidly sharing her experience w an acute mental health crisis & her long, difficult, maddening, deeply inspiring journey towards recovery - & return to work as a senior biopharma R&D leader. www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVWS...

Largely agree with this—clinical validation of drugs is an extremely small N universe, and it’s not feasible to validate human- vs AI-generated hypothesis prob of success. AI is much better suited to solving the sub-problems in drug dev (which vanilla machine learning was already pretty good at).

Amazing resource—hope it gets used broadly and we see TnSeq datasets become more common for Bacteroidales.

Things I love about London: BOLLARDS

🚨 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...

Report: You To Be Fired For Reading This Headline About Charlie Kirk

Such a delight to share our work on the evolution of a cheese rind fungus in @currentbiology.bsky.social. This is the fantastic PhD work of @nicolasleonlouw.bsky.social and resulted from amazing collaborations, a wedding proposal(!), an undergrad course, & more! 🧵 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler! Nanopore's getting accurate, but 1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies? 2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them? with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social 1 / N

We published a new lane of research today on human gut fungi. Shout out to 1st author @emilyvansyoc.bsky.social sky.social & @erdavenport.bsky.social For 20 years, bacteria received the lion's share of interest in the human gut. Yet we know little about the gut mycobiome. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Optimizing storage, high-molecular weight DNA extraction and genome reconstructions from human faecal samples. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.27.672560v1

Cryptosporidium parvum multidrug resistance protein confers resistance to toxic gut microbial metabolite Wonder how frequent this variability in bile acid sensitivity is across bacterial pathogens! www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Very neat, looking forward to exploring this hypothesis with gut microbes. Nice work @sulheim.bsky.social

This work is finally published! 🥳🧬 Plasmids are associated with very variable fitness costs in their different bacterial hosts. But, what is the contribution of each of the plasmid-genes in these host-specific effects? Study led by @jorgesastred.bsky.social, @sanmillan.bsky.social and myself! 1/14

Vedanta has an opening for a contract QC analyst. Please share with your network! The ideal candidate will have both micro and molecular biology experience. job-boards.greenhouse.io/vedantabiosc...

Breaking: The Gates Foundation said it would commit $2.5 billion through 2030 to support women’s health initiatives, its largest funding commitment ever to the issue. www.statnews.com/2025/08/04/b...

Excited to share this collaborative study with @ritatamayo.bsky.social showing that E. faecalis influences C. diff morphology through the phase variable CmrRST system! This work was co-led by the amazing team of @ashleyweiss.bsky.social and Jilarie Santos-Santiago!

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Enterococcus faecalis modulates phase variation in Clostridioides difficile https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.24.666506v1