Congratulations to our graduate student Ryuichi Ono for passing his quals and becoming a Ph.D Candidate! 🎉🥂

Congratulations to our graduate student Jack Demaray for passing his quals and becoming a Ph.D Candidate! 🎉🥳

With Eugene Koonin, we wrote a rather comprehensive review on the origin, evolution and organization of the #virosphere. We describe all 10 viral realms and the logic behind them, and so much more. Check it out! comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/biologies/ar...

Polish phage science meets Polish visual storytelling 🇵🇱🦠 To celebrate our last paper, we collaborated with an artist who previously worked on The Witcher 3 — to create a comic about phages and why understanding them matters in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Comic below 👇

Bacterial immune proteins have repeatedly evolved to become parts of eukaryotic immunity. But how? Our new preprint uncovers a recent horizontal transfer event & shows how eukaryotes co-opted a toxic bacterial immune protein 🦠🧪🧵 1/

One-pot parallel Sidewinder construction from oligo pools https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.01.722326v1

Phage terminase recognition by the bacterial immune sensors Avs2 and Upx https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.30.721860v1

Its official as of today - I am now an Associate Professor with Tenure at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte Dept of Bioinformatics & Genomics. A promise to my father - 20 years ago this Jan is finally complete. Never give up on your dreams - believe. #tenure

It's official-- my promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure has been approved by the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation!! This is a surreal moment and I owe my deepest gratitude to the members of my lab, collaborators, mentors, and colleagues who made this possible. Thank you!

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/... 🦠🧬🛠️🖥️💥

Exciting work!!! Bravo!

This is really impressive. Congrats to everyone involved. We are just getting started on testing Bridge Recombinases in yeast and what you can do in bacteria gives us inspiration.

Way to go @cresslab.bsky.social! So excited to see this out and how much the story progressed — stoked for a new flavor of microbiome editing!

Whoa cool

😮😮 amazing work from @cresslab.bsky.social

New hobby. Keep looking 😍 at these dataset heatmaps

Congrats to MCB's Gary Karpen & Russell Vance for being among six UC Berkeley faculty members elected to the NAS! 👏🥂 news.berkeley.edu/2026/04/30/n...

Synthetic microbiomics 🙌 Genome-scale editing with bridge recombinases - Congrats to @jayman1466.bsky.social @sophswartz.bsky.social, Agnes & team!

Bridge recombinase enables versatile rewriting of bacterial genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.29.721476v1

Really proud to have been a part of this!

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.

🎉 4 Institut Pasteur scientists elected as Fellows of the European Academy of Microbiology (EAM) 2026! David Bikard, Arianne Briegel, Ivo Gomperts Boneca & Eduardo Rocha honored for excellence in microbiology. Joining 95 new global members.

Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR. We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets. Thread + link below.

Congratulations to Karen Maxwell @themaxwelllab.bsky.social on the 2026 Peter Gilgan Canada Gairdner Momentum Award! An amazing selection and leader in the bacterial immunity field! www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0pg...

Very proud of this work and all the efforts from my team and collaborators on this! You can now use DGRs for in vivo targeted hypermutagenesis in E. coli. We also included some early proof of concept in Yeast thanks to @seth-shipman.bsky.social !

Dissecting the genetic determinants of bacterial DNA degradation by bacteriophage T5 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.02.716235v1

This work a massive effort and needed a solid funding. We thank both NSF program and DOE Phage Foundry phagefoundry.org funding to make this happen.

📣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.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... There is so much to explore in this data that one can spend life time going through. To make it easier to go through the data, @miloj.bsky.social put together this beautiful “Phage Datasheet”🤩 iseq.lbl.gov/PhageDataShe...

Enabling the prediction of phage receptor specificity from genome data https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.02.716166v1

Enabling the prediction of phage receptor specificity from genome data https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.02.716166v1

How diverse is bacterial immunity ? We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems. 👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie... Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

Excited to see our work out in Science today! Using machine learning to identify prokaryotic immune systems www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Happy to have made a small contribution for @gbouras13.bsky.social's study. Hope this is just one of many examples in independent researcher collaboration with academic scientists! #archaeasky folks, this pipeline rules for global baseline annotation for archaea doi.org/10.64898/202... 💻🧬🧫🦠

Can CRISPR edits enable precise tuning of plant gene expression? We think: yes. In our newest manuscript, we measured the effects of >30,000 CRISPR-like promoter mutations in sorghum protoplasts.

This paper started as an idea @albertomarina.bsky.social had many years ago… which of course means he was right all along 😄. Some of us just needed a few years (and a lot of experiments) to catch up. Grateful (and slightly humbled) to be part of this. Thanks Alberto! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Excited to see the major chapter of my PhD in print! We present a massively-parallel approach for screening CRISPR edits in plants to speed up agricultural test cycles + benchmark genomic LMs. Thanks to my fantastic co-authors and advisors. Link below!

Proud to share the yeast telomerase structure, led by the talented @hongmiaohu.bsky.social in collaboration with the Wellinger and Chartrand labs. Discovered 37 years ago and took us nearly 7 years but totally worth the wait 😍. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFE4...

How do you kill a MRSA superbug armed with 15 different anti-phage defense systems? You make a smarter phage. Check out our latest preprint on overcoming bacterial immunity using defense-guided engineering to build durable therapeutic phage cocktails! Led by Sarah Voss. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Out today in Nature Biotechnology — a team of IGI scientists including Brian Staskwicz, Kris Nyogi, Dave Savage (Savage Lab), Peggy Lemaux, & first author Evan Groover premier a cell-based method for understanding how #photosynthesis genes can be turned "up" or "down" https://ow.ly/KHWg50YyWbR

*And co-first author @ddingding.bsky.social!

Congratulations to our graduate student Pia Andrade for passing their quals and becoming a Ph.D Candidate! 🎉🥂

Our lab website is up and running! Come check it out: sites.google.com/berkeley.edu...

From the 2025 Banfield retreat, thank you for inviting us!

Congratulations to Dr. Zach LaTurner for publishing! Cross-order detection of bacteriophage transduction in microbial communities using RNA barcoding www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Cress lab is excited to welcome 2 new postdocs: Dr. Zach LaTurner from Rice University and Dr. Madeline Hayes from UW Madison, shared with @therubinlab.bsky.social

Huge congratulations to our graduate student, Ryuichi Ono, for publishing his first paper! Host range and ARG dissemination are shaped by distinct survival strategies of conjugative plasmids: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Selection-free whole genome transplantation revives dead microbes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.13.711674v1

📢 Funded PhD in molecular microbiology & phage biology How do bacterial stress responses control prophage activation and horizontal gene transfer? Join us at St Andrews to dissect Clp protease–mediated regulation in Staphylococcus aureus. Apply: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Early-bird registration discounts for CRISPR 2026 expire Feb 28. CRISPR 2026, held at Yale University, June 10 - 12, is the continuation of the original CRISPR meeting established in 2008. Register here: web.cvent.com/event/ac20b6...