Bacteria serve as a “maker space” for accelerated evolutionary experimentation that can spread across life forms. Even today, eukaryotes beg, borrow, and steal from bacteria’s innovations.

Most bacteria remain uncultured with vast microbial ‘dark matter’ awaiting discovery.. to address this am excited to share EDEN - an enhanced domestication method to grow uncultured bacteria & new diversity. Using EDEN we isolate a new species active against MDR pathogens.. doi.org/10.1093/isme...

ComEC structure is out!! 😍 Congratulations to the authors! That’s not an easy one. We have been trying for years to get that structure… We failed and gave up.

🔈Paper out! We turned the most fascinating phage host-switch mechanism, diversity-generating retroelements, into a programmable mutagenesis tool, DGRec. You can perform targeted hypermutation of any 50-200bp sequence directly in vivo in E. coli www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣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.

Cool tool to capture genes using a hunter gatherer 🦠 Large-scale recovery of integron cassettes for gene discovery screens www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... by @jaescudero.bsky.social @afpcarvalho.bsky.social @filipatr.bsky.social

Congratulations @wshuai.bsky.social and co-authors! We’re excited to introduce MODIFI, our new scalable method for detecting DNA modifications in PacBio metagenomic data and estimating ECE-host linkage. Check out the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Rapid resistance evolution against phage cocktails #ISMEJournal by Baltus van der Steen, Matti Gralka, and @yuvalmulla.bsky.social academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

How common is multicellularity in bacteria? And archaea? And how does it evolve? We wrote a short review "On the architecture and evolution of prokaryotic multicellularity". Preprint link: bit.ly/4ta06Gq Sharing and comments are much appreciated. 1/4

New paper showing how tailed #phages recognize diverse #Pseudomonas #T4P! Outstanding work by PhD candidate Ikram Qaderi, building on work started a decade ago during my sabbatical in the McArthur lab and in collaboration with the Guarné lab, now at #McGill. @mcmasteriidr.bsky.social

How complex functions, with important physiological and evolutionary impacts get repeatedly and efficiently transferred across genomes? That’s what we explored using one of the fastest-evolving loci in Bacteria: the capsule locus. The paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread👇

New paper 🔔 Collaboration @sullivan-lab.bsky.social Marissa Gittrich led the work Klebsiella phage biology has focused almost entirely on capsulated strains, but capsule loss is the #1 resistance mechanism under phage predation. We used a naturally acapsular host to reveal the receptor landscape

➡️ preprint from the lab! Bacteria have loads of antiviral defences in their mobile genetic elements (MGEs). So when MGEs move between bacteria, the defences move with them, generating a fast turnover of defences in bacteria. But what about the antiviral defence turnover in the MGEs themselves? 🤔 🧵👇

DeepMind has been playing fair up until Alphafold 3. I guess we can't blame them for keeping this new version for themselves www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🧵 After years out of the field, I and my lab are again working on bacterial type IV pili. We have just posted our first preprints, and I'm excited to share what we have discovered. This shows Neisseria gonorrheae bacteria infecting a human epithelical cell. Here, you can see the pili in red. 1/

The fitness landscapes of binders targeting protein surfaces that are evolutionarily predisposed to engage in PPIs is much narrower and deeper than those that target surfaces with no known interacting proteins. This might be b/c random binding events is bad, and selected against

A short research stay in 2019 (back in the pre-COVID era) at José R. Penadés lab turned into the third chapter of my PhD and today it finally sees the light.

Now out & nicely formatted in @isme-microbes.bsky.social A big analysis of ocean genomes & metagenomes co-led by former postdocs, now PIs, @gmdouglas.bsky.social & @cyanophage.bsky.social along with co-PIs @lbobay.bsky.social & Samuel Chaffron. A few highlights... 🧵 (1/n) doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Cytosine methylation contributes to the fitness of Caulobacter cells naturally expressing a Vsr-like protein: iScience www.cell.com/iscience/ful... 🦠

www.nature.com/articles/d41... I tried, and I'm impressed. Just input a general claim, it will return an expanded version backed by multiple experimental studies. link to the Asta tool here openscilm.allen.ai

Passioned by #bioenergetics? Do not miss our new article on the evolutionary history of oxidoreductases with G. Borrel and @sgribaldo.bsky.social @archaeal.bsky.social @valdeanda.bsky.social @pasteur.fr @cnrs.fr @cnrsbiologie.bsky.social @natecoevo.nature.com (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

I had never heard of this ABS... Some E. coli can apparently ferment sugars into alcohol within the gut www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I couldn’t agree more! Help support Wikipedia. It has been a pillar of high-quality knowledge sharing since the early web, and it’s more relevant than ever in the fuzzy age of AI www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Wow.. 😔 www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Neisseria gonorrhoeae carries an unusually large number of restriction–modification systems (up to 16!), many of which are phase-variable. How does this affect plasmid transmission in gonococci? doi.org/10.64898/202...

A great paper. Perfect for non-experts like myself. So, can we definitively say that bacterial species follow the BSC model? Homologous recombination DOES "play a crucial role in maintaining species cohesiveness, much like sexual reproduction does in eukaryotes" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint from my lab (with Arya Kaul, @fernpizza.bsky.social, and @brinda.eu), in which we explore new genes hitchhiking on the beneficial deletion that fused them together, and find them in the LTEE, M. Tb/bovis, and across the bacterial tree of life

🚨 New paper from our lab in Cell Reports @cp-cellreports.bsky.social, led by Clara Douadi! We show that bacteriophages can cross the intestinal barrier, with increased translocation in Crohn's disease. 🔗 www.cell.com/cell-reports... Many thanks to all the authors!

Happy to share that our work on HLp, a bacterial histone from Leptospira perolatii, is now published in Nature Communications 🎉 In this study, we show that HLp forms stable tetramers that wrap ~60 bp of DNA, revealing a distinct histone–DNA organization in bacteria. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We've come full circle! I began my postdoctoral career by identifying the peptidyl deformylase gene. Today, we show that half of bacterial species harbor multiple PDF genes (up to 7, for always a single Met-tRNA transformylase), and while the role of these PDFs ... academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

academic.oup.com/nar/article/... Collaboration with Y. Yamaichi. Killing donor bacteria in conjugation mixes using water enables transcriptomic profiling of early plasmid genes ! Superb tool for studying zygotic induction of these early genes, which include anti-SOS and anti-RM factors. #microsky

A membrane-sheathed flagellum! I had never heard of that www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nice move @cnrs.fr From 2026, no more Web of Science. But is the community truly ready for qualitative evaluation? Hiring, promotions, grants… we’ve all been shaped by the metrics we grew up with. Changing the mindset is the real challenge and will take time.

A newly discovered archaeal cell has a tiny genome and can’t metabolize biomolecules. It’s upending biologists’ definition of a living thing. “These types of organisms have been found before, but not as extreme as this,” said microbiologist Thijs Ettema.

🧬🛡️How are new immune mechanisms created? We show how Lamassu antiphage system, originated from a DNA-repair complex and evolved into a compact and modular immune machine, wt Dinshaw Patel lab in @pnas.org. 👏 @matthieu-haudiquet.bsky.social, Arpita Chakravarti & all authors! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Kwun et al. test whether transformation is an efficient mechanism for deleting prophage despite sensitivity to the ssDNA imported by competence machinery, identifying key interfaces in the evolutionary arms race between prophage and their hosts. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf259 #evobio #molbio

Winter Is Coming: And the Earth’s oldest organisms are prepping. 🥶

I started studying phages just over 4 years ago. The project that started it all is finally published. We isolated 6 closely related anti-Acinetobacter phages and showed that they are not capsule-specific and can reduce bacterial load in a rat model. More work still to come on this! #phagesky #IDsky

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A clever metabolic engineering framework in P. putida

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Nice phage host-range work with useful application

Our latest paper is out with @adiop.bsky.social and @gmdouglas.bsky.social. We analyzed the extent of homologous recombination between bacterial species (introgression) and how it affects species borders (it can vary a lot depending on the approach used to classify species!). rdcu.be/eQAMf

#microsky TraN variants mediate conjugation species specificity of IncA/C, IncH and Acinetobacter baumannii plasmids www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...