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

Exciting times! Our latest preprint is now live 🤩! After nearly 16 yrs of running my lab, I truly believe this is one of the most significant contributions we've made. It offers fresh hypotheses about how pandemic Vibrio cholerae spreads globally. Let’s dive in!🧵..1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm delighted to share that I will be joining the Department of Microbiology at Harvard Medical School in January 2025. The Laboratory of Systems Virology will study the dark proteome of viral genomes to understand how viruses work their magic🪄 Thrilled to be back in beautiful Boston 🌟

Hello 🦋 #protein / #microbio / #BioML community! We are excited to release Gaia🌎, a context-aware protein search tool, extending protein search and discovery capabilities beyond sequence and structure, to include *genomic context*. Search your favorite protein sequences with on gaia.tatta.bio

Happy to see our paper out @ Nat Comm We discovered a bacterial NLR-like pattern recognition receptor that can sense 3 different viral proteins as a signature for infection. This explains its broad defense against different phage families Congrats Nathalie Béchon! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Eukaryotes have linear DNA and their telomeres are hotspots for transposons. Many bacteria are also known to have linear chromosomes and plasmids. We identified several families of independently evolved telomeric transposons in cyanobacteria and Streptomyces. 1/7 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Join us in Paris on April 8th-10th for the 2025 Symposium on the Immune System of Bacteria 🥖🍷🦠🧬. Excited to welcome these amazing speakers at Institut Pasteur. Registration will open beginning of November. Abstract deadline February 28. Stay tuned. Co-organized by @soreklab.bsky.social P. Kranzusch

Out in Nature Microbiology, we predicted phage-bacteria interactions in E. coli species using only genomic information. Adsorption, not defense systems, is the main driver at this scale (relevant for a phage therapy context), leading to tailored cocktails! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

Join the bacteriophage researchers with this starter pack. go.bsky.app/Lkm6xoN

A collection of researchers working on bacterial defense and offense systems, including secretion systems, immunity mechanisms, bacterial warfare, and microbial arms races. Please share and let me know if you'd like to be added (or removed) from the list.

You know what'll liven this place up from the boring "here's why this community that's exactly like the old one is actually different" posts? Discourse. Pure, old sci-twitter dumb arguments. Which one we doin first? Lab naming? Paying reviewers? "Trainees"? Integrity vigilante justice?

This is a very cool study and important molecular tool! Also, I absolutely love how this is going down over on the other platform... 😂 [hint - molecular systems like this actually a way to _increase_ biosafety, working at the level of receptors, not viruses. But 🤷‍♂️). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Should've done this a long time ago, but here's my first post on #Bluesky. Check out my postdoc paper on a bacterial ubiquitin-like defense system that we recently published! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So excited for this! #phagesky

Registration for the 2024 Boston Symposium on the Immune System of Bacteria is now open - an exciting program with a fantastic lineup of speakers! Additional talks will be selected from submitted abstracts. Conference website: kranzuschlab.med.harvard.edu/bacterial-im...

Join us in April in Boston for the 2024 symposium on the immune system of bacteria ! 🧬🦠🥳 Registration now open: kranzuschlab.med.harvard.edu/bacterial-im... Abstract deadline March 4th.

Glad to present our new paper on RNA viruses in acidic hot springs. @NatureMicrobiol Together with S. Urayama, A. Fukudome, E. Koonin, T. Nunoura et al, we were hoping to find archaeal RNA viruses, instead we discovered a bunch of highly unusual bacterial viruses: www.nature.com/articles/s41...