CBASS is a cyclic nucleotide-based antiviral system in bacteria that is related to cGAS-STING signaling in animals. One of the big questions is how CBASS is activated during phage infection? We made some progress on this during my final year in the Kranzusch lab. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/5 Happy by a recent biorxiv pre-print about DARNA (PD-T7-3) anti-phage defense system. This system is activated by binding to ssDNA, presented by phage SSB, to cleave tRNA in the anti-codon loop. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I am incredibly honored to receive this recognition from the Michelson Medical Research Foundation for our work on innate immune signaling. www.michelsonmedicalresearch.org/news/michels...

Congratulations to Sonomi Yamaguchi for her paper at @nature.com. Sonomi discovered Clover defense and explained how nucleotide signals control each step of viral sensing, immune regulation, and viral restriction – named for her beautiful "four-leaf" structures 🍀 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The giant viruses surprised us at almost every turn of this project, but ultimately led us down a very rewarding path. Happy to share this work is now available online 🧪

Great new story from Sophie Helaine and Molly Sargen! www.helainelab.com

Hello world! I am excited to announce my lab is open at the University of Utah in the Department of Biochemistry. We are looking for scientists at all levels interested in studying host-virus interactions in both bacteria and animals. Come join us in beautiful Utah! (photo is 10 steps from lab)

ExoSloNano: nanogold probe-based labeling of proteins in live cells for cryo-ET and CLEM. @lindseynyoung.bsky.social @thevillalab.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m happy to share our new preprint! We uncovered the full diversity of bacterial TIR-based antiviral immune signaling, massively expanded the known diversity of Thoeris systems, and revealed conservation of TIR-derived immune signals across the tree of life. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🌟 WeINSPIREBio is hosting its first event! On Dec 4, we’re running a webinar: Structures of Success: Career Journeys of Women in Structural Biology If you work in SB, drug discovery, or just like hearing career stories from brilliant people, join us! And please share 🙏🏼 lnkd.in/ewjD5WPt #cryoEM

Bacteria can sense when a virus starts shredding their genome — by detecting methylated mononucleotides. Here’s the story of how we discovered the Metis defense system 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Mysteries of trafficking of the vRNP segmented genome and assembly of influenza A virus revealed by in situ cryo-ET! 🔗 rdcu.be/eMmct We are very excited that our paper is finally out! 🎉 Big congratulations to Moritz Wachsmuth-Melm and to everyone involved.

🚨 Systems Virology Journal Club – 8th Series! 🚨 #BillSchneider and I are delighted to announce another round of cutting-edge talks in #SystemsVirology! 🦠💡 Join us and an outstanding lineup of speakers, starting Oct 30. Free registration: shiraweingartengabbay.com/systems-viro... 🔬✨

Thank you to the Blavatnik Family Foundation and The New York Academy of Sciences for honoring our research uniting human innate immunity and bacterial anti-phage defense at @danafarber.bsky.social @harvardmicro.bsky.social @harvard.edu bit.ly/4pZUDkF blavatnikawards.org/news/items/t...

Our story describing the Panoptes bacterial immune defense system is now finally peer-reviewed and published today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Are viruses capable of regulating protein synthesis in the nuanced way of cellular organisms? Kinda! I’m excited to share some of my postdoc work that leveraged giant DNA viruses to address this question.

Huntingtin binds and bundles F-actin! Thrilled to team up with the Humbert (Sorbonne Université) and Song (KAIST) labs on this discovery. We had a blast doing cryo-ET on this unexpected complex — and now so many new questions lie ahead! #TeamTomo #CryoET #HTT #actin doi.org/10.1126/scia...

You’ve heard of ubiquitination, meet deazaguanylation: Doug Wassarman in our lab discovered phage defense pathways have co-opted Q nucleobase biosynthetic enzymes to catalyze a new form of protein conjugation chemistry @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very happy to share that I will be starting my lab at AITHYRA in October! My lab will use structural bioinformatics and functional genomics to understand the function of viral proteins, with a special emphasis on understanding how viruses subvert innate immunity.

How can we understand the earliest events in evolution of eukaryotic immunity? @yao-li.bsky.social reports incredible molecular fossils of complete bacterial-like operons in eukaryotes that illuminate how animal immunity was first acquired from anti-phage defense www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share our new @natmicrobiol.nature.com paper revealing the most complete arenavirus glycoprotein complex (GPC) structures to date 🤩 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First preprint from the Nemudryi Lab! 🍾 In this work, we link antiviral immunity in bacteria and humans by showing that homologs of human Schlafen nucleases protect bacteria from phages. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Many components of human immunity evolved from ancient pathways in bacteria. A beautiful story from @audeber.bsky.social‬ @enzopoirier.bsky.social‬ leverages this evolutionary connection to discover SIRal as a signaling protein in animal TLR-mediated innate immunity. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A new preprint led by Sonomi Yamaguchi in our lab describes a bacterial anti-phage defense system named Clover that uses nucleotide signals to both activate and inhibit host immunity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Welcome to the biochemical world of anti-phage nuclease-NTPases!🤩🤩

Out in Nature today: A new immune signaling molecule, His-ADPR, is produced by defensive TIR domain proteins in bacteria to protect from phage Joint work with the Tamulaitienė and Kranzusch labs www.nature.com/articles/s41... Congrats Carmel Avraham, Dziugas Sabonis, Renee Chang and co-authors!

DNA-gated ion channel🤯 Congrats Joel!!

Join the Blokesch lab (@EPFL) as a postdoc in Molecular Microbiology 🤩 Study Vibrio cholerae defense systems (phage/plasmid) in a dynamic, collaborative environment in Lausanne close to Lake Geneva in 🇨🇭! Please visit my lab's webpage for details about the position and how to formally apply.

🧪Exciting news out today in the world of Mendelian genetics (a statement for a niche crowd if ever there was one). Read my piece at @nature.com if, like me, you are surprised to hear we hadn't figured this out a long time ago. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

It was an honor for my lab and myself to host the meeting on the Immune Systems of Bacteria. Such a high from all the incredible science and sharing with scientists from the whole world the greatness of Paris in the spring. Vive la science, et vive Paris!

I’m excited to share my first paper in the Farnung lab, in which we report four cryo-EM structures of the human DNA replication machinery engaging with and progressing into a nucleosome.

Check out Doug’s awesome work!!

1/ Transposable elements are often called "jumping genes" because they mobilize within genomes. 🧬 But did you know they can also jump 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 cells? 🤯 Our new study reveals how retrotransposons invade the germline directly from somatic cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A short thread 🧵👇

Foldseek-Multimer—now published in @naturemethods.bsky.social—our fast multimer search tool, enables complex comparisons against the full PDB in seconds. It comes with BFMD, a collection of 300K+ predictions gathered from community projects. 📄 nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐 search.foldseek.com

🚨 🧬 Updated preprint on the completed BASEL collection - what's new? Some fun with bacterial immunity and a new P22 relative infecting E. coli K-12. A thread 🧵

@charlesgaba.com is a hero and downloaded CDC’s entire website. A small group of us has come together to preserve this critical resource and make it accessible to the scientific community. More to come. These data are public and they are ours. Deletion disobedience is one way to fight back.

Our paper out @Nature: CARD domains mediate anti-phage defense in bacterial gasdermin systems CARDs are essential for caspase recruitment during human inflammasome activation. We now find them in bacterial immune systems Congrats Tana Wein! Thank you Kranzusch lab! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

To all Americans: call your senators and ask them to oppose the appointment of RFK Jr. as the HHS secretary. He is unfit for that office. Want reasons? Here's what his cousin Caroline Kennedy (daughter of JFK and the former US ambassador to Australia) has to say: youtu.be/VFw24zVO_3E?...

Viral immune evasion proteins are widespread and block both bacterial and human immune proteins! Go check out Erez’s paper using AlphaFold-multimer to screen for new anti-defense proteins!!🤩🤩

Our paper out @CellCellPress: Structure guided discovery of viral proteins that inhibit host immunity Congrats Erez Yirmiya, Azita Leavitt, Gil Amitai, our collaborators at the Kranzusch lab, and coauthors A 🧵 1/10 www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Excited to share our work using machine learning to predict anti-phage defense systems! 1/n

What is the diversity of antiphage systems out there ? We used protein and genomic language models (and defense score!) to start bringing some answers: >45 000 protein families. Leb by E. Mordret. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Interactive UMAP to have fun mdmparis.github.io/antiphage-la...

Here's a project with surprising results: we show the presence of virulent phages across bacterial genome assemblies. Not any phage, and not your typical T1 contaminant, many phages have large genomes and seem to be in a state of persistence/oscillation (?!) between lysogeny and the lytic cycle.

Discovery of a new family of viral proteins that sequester immune signaling molecules - by Renee Chang, Philip Kranzusch and co

What a great way to end the year! ✨ Today in @cellpress.bsky.social we report the structure and function of the Shedu anti-phage defense system. tinyurl.com/4crj6dnx A long 🧵...

Excited to share that my graduate work is up on bioRxiv! I found that some SPβ-like phages of B. subtilis have a counter-defense system that inhibits NADase activity from the SpbK anti-phage defense during phage infection and activation of SpbK.

I’m so excited to share that some of my grad work in the @aaronwhiteley lab is now available on bioRxiv! We used an AlphaFold-multimer screen to uncover how a bacterial NLR-related proteins senses multiple phage-encoded proteins to confer phage protection. Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Can LLM agents discover novel protein functions? Introducing Gaia Agent 🌎 🤖: an AI biologist capable of reasoning across genomic contexts to predict functions of proteins! Gaia Agent is now integrated with Gaia Search at gaia.tatta.bio

Is it “winner-takes all” when the simplest living things compete? Check out my fresh publication on phage coexistence in Science and a thread below🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Registration is now open for the 2025 Symposium on the Immune System of Bacteria, taking place this year in Paris (April 8-10). We have a fantastic lineup of speakers! Register here: www.sisb2025.conferences-pasteur.org/home