I’ll take “animals I wasn’t expecting to see in Germany for $1000”

Skimming a paper about methylotrophic methanogens and the gut and kept seeing “NMR” in the figures and the text. Of course, my brain went right to “oh they have a lot of metabolite/metabolomic data”. Turns out, NMR sounds stood for “naked mole rat”, whose gut microbiome was being studied

Question for the microbial ecologists out there: do you make a terminological distinction between a microbiome and its associated environment? For clarity, the next post in this thread provides the sentence I'm writing/editing that this question is related to.

1/ Excited to share our preprint! 🥳 Degradation of aromatic compounds, including BTEX pollutants, requires highly endergonic aromatic ring reduction. Using #cryoEM and in situ #cryoET, we show how BCRII couples electron bifurcation modules in one giant redox machine www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How do “LEGO-like” electron-bifurcating modules combine to drive degradation in BTEX-contaminated ecosystems? Check out our latest preprint, where we use cryo-EM and cryo-ET to reveal how the 1 MDa BCRII complex powers extremely endergonic aromatic ring reduction. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Jack Szostak "All of these things frighten me, and they should frighten you as well. I made the decision to create a life for myself here, because I viewed this as a place that rewarded determination, hard work, and integrity. It still has a chance to be that place again."

I just completely fell for something that I initially thought was satire because it was so crazy. On further inspection, it was actually satire.

Just got an email from my grad school’s Graduate Research Fund asking me to donate. The really amusing part is that the email addresses me as “Mr. Kountz”. I mean, if there was any organization that should know that I have a PhD…

Okay methanogen people (and particularly Methanococcus people): Does anyone have access to this publication?: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... If you do, could you DM me so I can send you my email (and then you could send me the pdf?)

A genetic toolkit for the human gut bacterium Mediterraneibacter gnavus identifies capsular polysaccharides as a competitive colonization factor www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 I was waiting for this paper for a while 🥳 Our new paper in @pnas.org shows that ATP synthase drastically alters membrane properties related to proton diffusion. Funded by @volkswagenstiftung.de www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

"My motto is: just do it!" We love this interview w/ Maren Nattermann, Research Group Leader @ Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, on Marjory Stephenson (1885–1948), pioneer of chemical microbiology as well as her own path into science www.mpg.de/26210626/mar... #IWD2026

Happy to share our new paper on proton transfer in metalloenzymes, out now in @pccp.rsc.org! Exploiting crystallography, electrochemistry, FTIR spectroscopy, and QM calculations we identified a Zundel ion in the catalytic proton tranfer pathway of [FeFe]-hydrogenase. doi.org/10.1039/D5CP...

Maybe this is just me, but whenever someone says Mossbauer I think of the book Mossflower in the Redwall series. I can’t be the only one.

So excited to share our cryo-EM study of the nitrogenase cofactor assembly scaffold NifEN expressed in E. coli! @ribbehulab.bsky.social @ucibiosci.bsky.social @natcatal.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today, I inoculated a methanogen culture for the first time in at least 10 years. Believe it or not

Pretty allosteric regulation data from a manuscript I'm writing on my PhD work. Red and blue data are from two alternative substrates. Filled symbols = absence of allosteric regulator. Open symbols: presence of allosteric regulator. X-axis is mM substrate

I’ve had a really positive experience in Germany so far, but from time to time I get a deep feeling of sadness from being so far from home. Not a new thing for a human to experience of course

Evolutionary bioenergetics of sporulation "energetic cost of sporulation in units of ATP by integrating time-resolved genome, transcriptome, and proteome profiles" #Bsubtilis #MicroSky #PNAS by @ckarakoc.bsky.social @shoestrapped.bsky.social @jaytlennon.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Does anyone know a good commercial source of rumen fluid in Europe (Germany in particular)? Maybe I just need to start cultivating a relationship with farmers...

From Joe Krzycki's, Bing Hao's and @djferguson.bsky.social 's labs: Delineation of the Active Site of MtgB, a Cobalamin-dependent Glycine Betaine Methyltransferase www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Das wetter ist sehr schlecht. Es schneit hefting und ich bin kalt

One of the perks of living in Marburg is that you can email Rolf Thauer and be like “remember me? want to get coffee?” and he’s just like “yes” and suggests a place that like 300 ft from your appartment

Fantastic team effort of several groups in the SPP2002 @dfg.de and a brilliant PhD - Eva Herdering in the Kiel team @schmitzstreitslab.bsky.social

A newly identified quaternary amine:corrinoid methyltransferase (for tetramethylammonium) in Methanococcoides. Surprisingly, this one isn't a trimethylamine methyltransferase family member! www.frontiersin.org/journals/mic...

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

Watch this video if you want to cry over overwhelming decency rather than over rage about what some are trying to turn our country into.

So important. What they say is not the story. That is never the story. What happened is the story. Write what happened.

In the past, I wasn’t one of the people who said we should abolish ICE. Now, I am. There does need to be an organization that is responsible for things like immigration, interdiction of counterfeit currency operations, etc, but ICE is rotten and needs extirpataton

This guy went to work today, put a mask on, kidnapped a 5 year old child, and then used him as bait so both he and his father could be sent behind bars

A five-year-old boy seized on his way home in Minnesota and now locked up in Texas. His family didn't know where he was for 24 hours.

Important work here from the NYT. Ross wasn’t run over. He dropped his cell phone, which he had shifted to his left hand to draw his weapon. And then he shot and killed a person with the gun in his right hand. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/v...

Very sad to hear about the passing of Peer Bork, one of true giants of computational biology www.embl.org/news/embl-an...

I currently live in this twilight zone where Germans can tell that I have German ancestry from my last name, but also from my last name, I’m clearly not German

Thrilled to be able to finally post my first adventure into secondary metabolism!: Flavoaffinins, Elusive Cellulose-Binding Natural Products from an Anaerobic Bacterium pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.... Co-authors: Ruocheng Yu, f. undergrad Jessie Lee, @katherinem.bsky.social , and Emily Balskus!

/2 Anyway, America was never about everyone loving liberty; America was always about enough people loving liberty and being willing to defend it to keep down the people with totalitarian souls.

It would be a mistake to see Trumpism as authoritarianism imposed on an unwilling nation, as opposed to authoritarianism implemented in a nation with a plurality that is already made up of authoritarian bootlickers who created the context for Trumpism to thrive.

Walking to my soon-to-be work through a trail in the woods today. Major brothers Grimm vibes

Stephen Colbert on the ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good: “The message from this administration is clear. Only they determine the truth. And when their forces come to your city: obey or die. And if you die, you clearly didn’t obey. This should be an alarm bell for the entire country.”

Please share! The Balskus Lab (where I did my PhD) his hiring a Research Assistant to work on the vaginal microbiome: us.smrtr.io/4rGc4 Can testify that branch of the Balskus Lab (like the other branches) is a vibrant research environment with cool projects and cool equipment!

Marburg: soon to be my new home (at least for a few years). Is it any wonder I’m going there? So much great microbiology, past and present

This is my last week in the US before moving to Marburg, Germany. I’m flying to Frankfurt on Friday

Functional insights into the nitrogenase-like enzyme superfamily: Trends in Biochemical Sciences www.cell.com/trends/bioch...

As far as I can see, the only reason the US (likely) won’t face well deserved sanctions is that the relevant countries don’t want to antagonize the US

Not going to pretend to bring in a legitimate leader. At least not today

Macquarrie and Simon’s P Chem text is about as close to a perfect textbook as I’ve ever seen. Bonus is that I’ve heard people call it “the red P Chem Bible”

My New Year’s resolution is really more of a continuing resolution. It’s to lose the need to be “on track” life- and career-wise. The process can be nonlinear and even go into reverse at times. And in the end, very little of it matters

I feel like students who heavily rely on AI for work that they could very much do themselves aren’t realizing that they are setting themselves up to be the first to have their jobs replaced by AI

Post a perfect album from the 90s that isn’t Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden or Alice In Chains Whatever and ever amen by Ben Folds Five I wouldn’t say it is perfect but I have really fond memories from early college