🚨 PhD Opportunity 🚨 Interested in microbiology, phages & water security? Join me and Prof Cindy Smith to test phages as a sustainable alternative to chlorine in drinking-water biofilters. Metagenomics, phage discovery & ecology — all in one exciting project! Apply: www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvl...

Assembly, architecture and functional roles of microbial surface layers www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Fantastic paper by James Bean and colleagues on phage Bas63 - this has been one of the first phages I ever isolated just for fun as a PhD student (in 2012!). It's #2 on this plate of Rhine river water on an E.coli K-12 lawn.... How it started /// How it's going

The Center for Microscopy and Image Analysis at the University of Zurich is seeking a new Head: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... It is super fun to work with them, tons of expertise and cutting edge instrumentation in ❄️🔬 Application deadline: December 15, 2025.

Gluing a bulky host protein onto an immune surveillance complex is a wild mechanism of viral immune evasion! @natmicrobiol.nature.com #phagesky #phage #microsky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bonjour, Lausanne! 🏞🌤🍂 #sciencetravels

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Good morning, Oxford! 🇬🇧🌂🍂 #sciencetravels

Today's pro-tip for effective research seminars: Invest your efforts in clear and accessible visuals! Figures from papers often have too high complexity for seminars - a bit like a book needs to be streamlined when making a movie out of it. 😅📚🎬

Istvan Miko introduces us to the phenotypically consistent and shockingly productive hymenopterist Lubomir Masner and his dedication to (among other things) tiny wasps

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Today's pro-tip for effective research seminars: Show fewer things but explain them better. People fall in love with a cool new story and not with your supplementary data.

early career scholar and their first publication

Today's pro-tip for effective research seminars: Show fewer things but explain them better. People fall in love with a cool new story and not with your supplementary data.

Bacterial Halloween mask crafted by uniquely talented MSc student Dominic Spichtig - the team of Enea @phagemuffin.bsky.social is setting new standards in the lab! 🎃🔥🧬

#phahe #phagesky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#sciencetravels today at Imperial College London - great campus and fantastic colleagues! 🇬🇧🧬

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

#mycrosky #synbio www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#phagesky jumbo #phage -mediated HGT www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

How does life evolve to adapt to modern cities? Out now in Science, my PhD work with @lindymcbr.bsky.social uncovers the ancient origin of the “London Underground mosquito” – one of the most iconic examples of urban adaptation. 🧵(1/n) @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ady4515

Day 22, GOAT. The most iconic (if not the greatest phage of all time) in terms of looks are myovirus like phages. They look like a lunar lander and are instantly recognisable as a virus. #Drawtober #SciArt #PhageSky

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #phagesky #phage defence #synbio #microsky

Fantastic day to present our work to the ETH Zürich microbiology colleagues on Hönggerberg campus - for once a local #sciencetravels! 🚌🧬🍂

Setting the stage for today's food microbiology lecture - if you like your kidneys, wash those raw veggies and be careful with undercooked meat! 🦠☠️

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT📣: I haven’t been this excited to be part of something new in 15 years… Thrilled to reveal the passion project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half!🙀🥳 (thread 👇)

Easy vacation days in Ticino before some predictably dense months are coming up... 🏝🏔🧳

Fantastic lab hike in the Alpstein mountains together with our friends from Martin Loessner's group 🏞☀️😎

#Listeria monocytogenes causes serious infections by invading cells and crossing intestinal, blood–brain, and placental barriers, leading to #bacteraemia, CNS, and maternal–neonatal complications https://www.nature.c...

Day 3, Soft. Soft agar is used to visualise phages - plaque assay: bacteria infected with phages are mixed with soft agar, poured over an agar plate. A bacterial lawn grows & plaques appear - as phages infect bacteria, multiply, kill & repeat to form an expanding hole. #drawtober #SciArt #Phagesky

Fantastic lab hike in the Alpstein mountains together with our friends from Martin Loessner's group 🏞☀️😎

Today in @nature.com , we highlight how a cousin of CRISPR-Cas10, mCpol, establishes an evolutionary trap in anti-phage immune systems. Check out @erinedoherty.bsky.social and my work from @doudna-lab.bsky.social lab here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The role of mobile genetic elements in adaptation of the microbiota to the dynamic human gut ecosystem #CurrOpinMicrobiol from @lgbacteria.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Guten Tag Freiburg - great city trip with the family to present at the German Pharmaceutic Society! 🧬🍺

I said I will never work on phages, but having @micheleleroux.bsky.social next door made me change my mind. Here is Alexis's new paper showing how different phages deal with the capsular barrier to infect Acinetobacter! A great collaboration between our labs! journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

Now published! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Very nice collaboration with Hoogenboom ( @ucl.ac.uk ) and Bonev ( @uniofnottingham.bsky.social ) labs.

Happy to share our work on a T6SS effector with ADP ribose cyclase activity, published in JBC @asbmbjournals.bsky.social Great work of Julius Martinkus @jmartinkus.bsky.social and (always) great collaboration with @dukasju.bsky.social and @laurentterradot.bsky.social www.jbc.org/article/S002...

It is not only antibiotics but also certain viruses – known as bacteriophages – that can kill off pathogenic bacteria. However, Switzerland lacks the legal framework for the use of these viruses in therapy. What would need to change? Researcher Alexander Harms explains. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

Synthetic lethal TN-seq! #microsky 🦠

You’ve heard of ubiquitination, meet deazaguanylation: Doug Wassarman in our lab discovered phage defense pathways have co-opted Q nucleobase biosynthetic enzymes to catalyze a new form of protein conjugation chemistry @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Bonjour, Quebec! 🍛🌤🧬 #sciencetravels

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #microsky

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

You like phages ? In this publication, we use metaHiC and our new version of the MetaTOR pipeline to challenge the traditional view of phages with a narrow host range. @rkoszul.bsky.social @natmicrobiol.nature.com @cnrs.fr @institutpasteur.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My favorite is the paper on Cacio e Pepe sauce - good science is needed to not mess with excellent pasta! I am sure our local pasta nerd Enea @phagemuffin.bsky.social would agree 😁🍝

My group at Science has been running a big campaign to engineer new channelrhodopsins. Excited to share the first results from it today: a suite of highly sensitive new opsins. We call them "WAChRs". Everyday indoor office lighting is enough to activate them pretty strongly.

Fantastic day for my annual visit at Pestalozzi Schulcamps to discuss phages with primary school classes ☀️🚆🧬

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac... A host organelle (in sea slugs) integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis