Happy new year to everybody - let's make it a good one (though the world seems to be seriously off track...)! 🌟🎉🧬

#microsky #synbiosky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

IMO knowing when to drop (even temporarily) a project is the hardest thing to navigate as a PI. It depends on so many variables, a lot of them unrelated to the actual science. The call is by definition made with incomplete information - deciding when high risk, high gain is just too risky

This story is absolutely wild. Did you know that avocados change sex over the course of a day? And that it's controlled by a single ancient balanced polymorphism? This is flat our crazy

Cold walks and warm delicacies - merry Christmas to all! 🎅🏼🍻

A scalable transposon mutagenesis system for non-model bacteria https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.22.696024v1

Very cool preprint (with strong citizen science!) on the protection of kombucha against pathogenic microbes by it's fermentation microbiome 👇🏼🧫🛡

'One last note: do not confuse engagement with entertainment. While entertainment can be a powerful tool for capturing students’ attention, entertained students may be in a good mood but remain passive.' Ľubomír Tomáška @emboreports.org link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Happy holidays from our lab Christmas party - enjoy some quiet days to relax (and write...)! 🎅🏼☃️🧬

✨New preprint! 🧵1/4 Excited to share our work on AI-guided design of minimal RNA-guided nucleases. Amazing work by @petrskopintsev.bsky.social @isabelesain.bsky.social @evandeturk.bsky.social et al! Multi-lab collaboration @banfieldlab.bsky.social @jhdcate.bsky.social @jacobsenucla.bsky.social🧬 🔗👇

After years of struggling with how to cryopreserve one of our endosymbiotic bacteria, we found something that worked! 🦠☃️ We crowd-sourced suggestions and then @ruthwright.bsky.social tried the most common ones (like 🥛...). Want to do the same? Here is how we did it: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#microsky #phagesky A DNA-mimicking protein antagonises #phage SPbeta’s repressor and connects SOS response to the control of lysis-lysogeny www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🦠🧪🧬🚨 New paper and database alert: the new IMG/VR release is now MetaVR ! We have a new website - meta-virome.org - with quick search capabilities for the >24M viruses, >12M vOTUs, and >42M protein clusters (including >790k with predicted structures !). academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026! The Microbial Ecosystems Lab @hot-mes-asu.bsky.social at ASU studies microbial interactions, spatial ecology, and imaging-driven microbiome science. If you love microbes, microfluidics, or single-cell analysis, let’s talk! www.microbialeco.systems

Bioinformatics is in shambles at the Denver airport’s acronym game

New post by me on #MITPressReader @mitpress.bsky.social On the 100th anniversary of the #ScopesMonkeyTrial the ways we depict #evolution can still give an erroneous progressive view (that evolution leads to humans or ‘increased complexity’). thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-our-pictu...

Beautiful Christmas decoration crafted by talented PhD student Sophia Zimmermann - ready to put those phages up at our tree! 🎄🎅🏼🌟

#microsky #phagesky Structural insights into non-tailed Vibrio #phages www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Stunning illustrations and figures. Take that, AI slop

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thrilled to share our new study! We show that mirusviruses include lineages packed with spliceosomal introns and likely replicating in the nucleus of unicellular eukaryotes—a sharp contrast to most large and giant eukaryotic viruses that replicate in the cytoplasm.

#microsky #phagesky #phage #virus academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

The host range of generalist and specialist phages in capsule-diverse Klebsiella hosts is driven by the evolvability of receptor-binding proteins @plosbiology.org from @pilardomingoc.bsky.social journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Type VII ABC transporters underpin many core activities in the bacterial cell envelope - including efflux, cell division and lipoprotein trafficking. A new paper in PLOS Biology reveals YbbAP-TesA as a novel Type VII system in E. coli. dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Its only been two months and our new PhD student is already making memes of me.

Mindblowing tenure lecture of Nicholas Bokulich from our institute at ETH Zürich @ethz.ch on microbial ecosystems "from farm to flush"! 🍷🥖🦠

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

New preprint from our lab! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @aiswarya.bsky.social tested the role of priority effects in shaping the honeybee gut microbiota using an elegant combinatorial experimental design. A thread🧵....

Arbitrium systems control lysis/lysogeny through the regulation of small antirepressor proteins www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨Preprint alert - this is a big one! We transfer the revolutionary power of TnSeq to bacteriophages. Our HIDEN-SEQ links the "dark matter" genes of your favorite phage to any selectable phenotype, guiding the path from fun observations to molecular mechanisms. A thread 1/8

#microsky #phagesky #phage Anyone who’s tried deleting prophages in the lab by HR knows the difficulties of the task. Here we have an example of how HR-mediated natural transformation might hit the same hurdle in a more native context. academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

🚀New preprint from our lab! I am very excited to finally share what has been the main focus of my PhD for the past almost 3 years! It is about viral dark matter and a powerful tool we built to shed light on it. 🧬💡 Continue reading (🧵)

🚨Preprint alert - this is a big one! We transfer the revolutionary power of TnSeq to bacteriophages. Our HIDEN-SEQ links the "dark matter" genes of your favorite phage to any selectable phenotype, guiding the path from fun observations to molecular mechanisms. A thread 1/8

Nature research paper: Rare microbial relict sheds light on an ancient eukaryotic supergroup go.nature.com/486YtjW

Bacterial networks #BacNet26 in September 2026 will be chaired by @lalouxlab.bsky.social and co-chaired by @s-lab.bsky.social with @coralietesseur.bsky.social Sneak peak on invited speakers and preliminary program: meetings.embo.org/event/26-bac...

Meeting some colleagues in Lucerne today ☀️🏔🍂 #sciencetravels

🚨 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

You and the text you need to trim in order to meet the word limit

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! 🎃🔥🧬