Asgard archaea were first found in mud at the bottom of the North Sea. Today, cellular biologists Martin Pilhofer and Christa Schleper are exploring one of their more elusive structural elements: a totally tubular system that looks a lot like our own. www.quantamagazine.org/tiny-tubes-r...

DNA and Cas9 on a CIS? Wow 🤯 Injecting excitement into the field! Very cool! @zhangf.bsky.social

Check out 🧐 our new preprint 📜: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Congrats🎉 to @vasilgaisin.bsky.social and Corina Hadjicharalambous, who studied contractile injection systems directly in hot spring♨️ bacterial mats🦠 #microsky #teamtomo #Chloroflexota

It's been ~13 years ago in the lab of Grant Jensen, when Martin @pilhoferlab.bsky.social showed me how to prepare media, do first protein preps and negative stain EM. I had no idea how much more I’d learn from him over the next years - THANK YOU MARTIN for this incredible ride 🙏🙏🙏

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

#MicroSky Summer read! Predatory bacteria kill and eat other bacteria. Their deadly actions come in many flavors, often via direct physical contact between predator & prey 🧛 How do they do it? Our review 📖 @coralietesseur.bsky.social @ysantin.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Come and join Martin‘s Lab at the University of Zurich and become our colleague 🧫🔬

Our new preprint with a new #Asgard from stromatolites (and its Desulfobacterota companion). Complete circularised genomes of both, cool #cryoem images, protein modelling, etc Big group effort with a lot of people involved #archaeasky #archaea www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to say that my Current Opinion in Structural Biology article came out today. I hope it helps to guide to you in using cryo-ET to make new biological discoveries! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Happy to see our collaborative work on the contractile injection system (CIS) in Streptomyces published. We show that the membrane protein CisA gives Streptomyces CIS a licence to kill. @pilhoferlab.bsky.social & Bastien Casu, @joesallmen.bsky.social #MicroSky elifesciences.org/articles/104...

Excited and honored to be joining the EMBO Member community 🥳 Congratulations also to all the other newly elected members! -Martin

#cryoET folks, this is your chance to combine a beautiful location 🏔️ with cutting-edge imaging of weirdo microbes 🦠 Florian is an amazing colleague & scientist and I am sure he will also show you how to 🎿🚵🏼🏃‍♂️🍺

New tenure track assistant professor position in molecular microbiology in our department @dmf-unil.bsky.social @unil.bsky.social! We are casting a wide net for an experimental molecular microbiologist. Apply here: wwwfbm.unil.ch/releve/appli...

A great day for #teamtomo First, @cellarchlab.com shows the beauty of the mitochondrial respiratory chain (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... ... and now my colleagues @florianwollweber.bsky.social & @xujwet.bsky.social visualized tubulins in Asgard archaea 😍🤯 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

We're on the cover of @science.org this week. Awesome work by @florentwaltz.bsky.social. #CryoET is reaching crazy resolutions inside cells, and this is just the beginning. Fantastic interpretation of the proton motive force by @verenaresch.bsky.social. Always a pleasure making #SciArt with you!🧪🧶🧬🌾

Press release from @unibas.ch and @biozentrum.unibas.ch about our new #cryoET study on mitochondrial respirasomes. Led by the unstoppable @florentwaltz.bsky.social 🙌 🧪🧶🧬 #TeamTomo

Check out 👀 this awesome preprint on new cultures of Asgard (Hod) archaea with beautiful 🔬 images by Imachi et al. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Small Things Considered wrote a blog post about our recent findings on bacterial predation. Thanks a lot @stcmicrobeblog.bsky.social for highlighting captain Aureispira 😊🏴‍☠️

Towards community-driven visual proteomics! Excited to finally share this large-scale curated & annotated dataset of 1829 high-quality #cryoET tomograms of the little green alga that just keeps giving— Chlamydomonas! 🧪🧶🧬🌾🌊🌍 Preprint📜: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A short thread🧵👇

We found that many bacterial species use exogenous peptidoglycan fragments - released by lysis of neighboring cells - as a general danger signal, triggering a danger response that protects bacteria against many dangers: biofilm formation. Details here 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks to an @snf-ch.bsky.social Starting Grant, my group will move to the Institute of Medical Microbiology at University of Zürich in summer 2025. Let's move cryoET literally next to the clinics and investigate bacterial pathogens from molecules to the patient #FreezeInTheClinics 🏥❄️🔬

It’s wildin’ out there in the microbial world 💀🦠 - with Aureispira grappling and stabbing 🔪🩸 and Yersinia sacrificing themselves 🫥🤕 Now, it’s time we expose the violent tendencies 🥷 of a salty 🧂 #archaea in our new paper in Science Advances! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/5 #cryoET #teamtomo