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Cheap and easy method for nanopore sequencing phage DNA directly from plaques. Proud of lab members Brenna and Patrick for doing this work *with absolutely no help from me* !! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Catalogue entries for more than 100 antibodies sold by the research services and supply company Thermo Fisher Scientific contain images that have apparently been manipulated, according to a pair of science sleuths. go.nature.com/4wX4yej

New preprint. In S. sanguinis, a C5a peptidase-like protease (ScpH) polymerizes along eDNA, turning it into a catalytic biofilm scaffold. Great work from @robinanger.bsky.social in our lab, with Pelicic lab @lcbofficiel.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Beyond thrilled that our paper ‘Co-migration of hundreds of microbial species over metres drives selection and promotes non-motile hitchhikers’ has been accepted in Nature Communications! 🎉🦠 (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Like a prophage being awakened from its slumber, the phage field has seen a lot of renewed activity during the last decade. Check out our new @natrevmicro.nature.com review on the temperate phage life cycle here to stay up-to-date 🧫🦠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The paper on my Ph.D. work is fully online! We used a ribozyme that barcodes 16S rRNA to track the transduction range of phage P1 in a synthetic community and real wastewater communities, while diving deeper into the unique range conferred by P1s two tail fibers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy to share our latest pre-print on the Druantia defense system. We find that Type III Druantia uses a cooperative helicase-nuclease mechanism to sense and degrade replication-associated forked DNA structures. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A🧵

1/ Excited to share our new paper in Science @science.org: “Toward life with a 19-amino acid alphabet through generative artificial intelligence design.” A great collab w/ Sergey's group @sokrypton.org at MIT @columbiasysbio.bsky.social science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🦠🧬🛠️🖥️💥

A really cool method we are just starting to explore!

Our lab is proud to present our latest work harnessing Bridge Recombinase for genome-scale editing in diverse bacteria, microbiome editing, and programmable horizontal gene transfer.

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!