While BioNtech & Moderna become household names because of their Covid vaccines, those emerged from different projects: finding ways to treat the most challenging cancers. They hypothesized that we could vaccinate patients against their own tumors, & evidence is mounting that they were right! 1/n 🧪

1/9 New preprint from the Sternberg Lab in collaboration with the Nishimasu Lab! We uncover how the DRT3 antiphage immune system pairs two reverse transcriptases, one RNA-templated and one protein-templated, to build a double-stranded DNA effector. doi.org/10.64898/202...

New book "A Primer for Experimental Evolution" with coauthors Michael Rose, Margarida Matos, and Joe Graves. www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook... A compact primer for students and colleagues interested in planning and designing experiments to address questions in evolutionary biology.

set up a nesting box with cam nine days ago and this morning got a prospective tenant - fingers crossed that his mate will approve

🚨Faculty job search: University of Illinois Chicago Micro & Immuno department is hiring! Open rank and open area within host-pathogen interactions. Apply by May 31 to join us in UI College of Medicine in the heart of Chicago! uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Latest paper out in Nature Communications! We find molecular dating evidence that life was using molybdenum and tungsten as far back as ~3.4 billion years ago, reshaping how we think about trace metals and early microbial evolution. Read here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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/

Can we reconstruct ancient pathogen genomes from animal remains? Can paleopathology help prioritize promising specimens? Our new paper demonstrates this by screening more than 300 specimens from across Eurasia over the past 6,000 years. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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.

The truly stunning part of this marathon WR is his final full 5K split from 35-40K. 13:42 🤯 That wins most major 5K races

Phage community: our plasmids for executing phage transposon mutagenesis are now on AddGene and I would love for you to try it out! It is powerful for ID'ing all essential genes and knocking out all non-essentials in a single experiment :) New exp here: www.addgene.org/browse/artic...

Significant differences are indicated with 🐦‍⬛

Feels like this paper on protein-templated DNA synthesis by a natural enzyme warrants some comment. So here's a 🧵. /1 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

WAT www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Over two billion years, a fierce battle has raged between bacteria and the viruses that infect them. The resulting evolution has shaped the way our bodies fight disease today. @vcallier.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/the-ancient-...

📣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.

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

I said “launch window”, not “Launch Windows”!

Genome sequence of a 5,000 year old bacterium (Psychrobacter) from cave ice contains more than 100 genes associated with antimicrobial resistance 😳 www.frontiersin.org/journals/mic...

Happy to share the final version of my postdoc work on bacterial CBASS immunity with @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social published in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Why do intrinsically disordered proteins appear larger than they are in SDS-PAGE? We investigate how sequence properties affect SDS-PAGE mobility using synthetic IDRs. Conclusion: We need to consider both SDS binding and the compaction of protein-SDS complexes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our microbial ancestors were probably oxygen-tolerant www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Still not in the final format but couldn't wait to share it with you, after a long jpurney to get here. Our latest work (with @davidalbesa.bsky.social lab) on Tke5 T6SS toxin from my favourite bug P. putida KT2440. 🧵 1/5 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

The use of multiyear funding consumes the current year's appropriation faster than would be the case for annually funded grants, limiting the number of awards that can be made. This is a major factor driving down success rates. I will continue to track this and explore its implications. 5/5

Final version of our last paper is out! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ever wondered how a eukaryotic transcription factor finds its specific DNA motif in the vast genome? In this preprint, we directly measured the dynamics of this search process in living cells, revealing a cooperative mechanism mediated by disordered regions. 1/10 doi.org/10.64898/202...

Holy smoke. What ultimately happened???

A short Bluetorial on plots of NIH application success rates as a function of percentile. 1/20

The Trojan Horse is real, and it’s microscopic! 🐴🦠 Our paper is out today in @cellcellpress.bsky.social! We discovered that deltaviruses physically hide INSIDE helper viruses to sneak into new cells. And to prove it, we had to image them from every angle. 🧵👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

Excited about a recent paper from Bassam el Hafi, a recently graduated PhD student, & Fabrice Jean Pierre leveraging 4,200 respiratory microbiomes from CF (pre- and post-ETI), and testing one of the hypotheses that arose from this analysis. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @asm.org #JBacteriology

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

Evolutionary causes and consequences of gene duplication www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧬💻🧪 (🔓 rdcu.be/e4CYK)

Last year, we proposed a model of plasmid evolution via fusion and fragmentation (via mge mediated recombination) generating mosaics, by studying historical isolates. Excited to see a MASSIVE paper from @jrpenades.bsky.social , @epcrocha.bsky.social expanding on this www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper from us. If you're interested in genetic manipulation of Clostridia, we have a few new tools for you! 36 new plasmids - all available from @addgene.bsky.social www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... #microsky

New paper from my team detailing a greatly expanded genomic database of Asgard archaea revealing of high energy metabolism those related to eukaryotes! Led by @katyappler.bsky.social lots of help from @jameslingford.bsky.social @valdeanda.bsky.social @kassipan.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Delighted to see over 17 million new protein structure predictions from novel proteins in AllTheBacteria are now integrated into the AlphaFold Database at @ebi.embl.org ! Huge work from @gbouras13.bsky.social @oschwengers.bsky.social and friends to generate these. www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/u...

🧵 New preprint! Our 4-lab team evolved Streptococcus pneumoniae in antibiotic-treated mice of varying immune states and discovered something surprising: bacteria rarely evolved resistance. Instead, they found a different way to survive — by rewiring RNA turnover. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

And save >80% on the cost by pooling 6 or more plasmids into a single sample using our free SAVEMONEY algorithm! elifesciences.org/articles/88794 colab.research.google.com/github/Masaa...

Recently, a Hypothesis was posed in @jcellsci.bsky.social in which the root of eukaryotes was placed between kinetoplastids and all other eukaryotes. From this, it was implied that LECA did not have a kinetochore. We argue this is highly unlikely. A 🧵(1/12) Read our reply here: tinyurl.com/n87myhpr

By 2028, all 4-character PDB IDs will be exhausted. After that, all new entries will receive extended IDs: 12 characters total, formatted as pdb_ + 8 alphanumeric characters (pdb_1000axyz) Test it from PDB Beta Archive Read more: www.wwpdb.org/news/news?ye...

Cannot believe that I got to profile an extraordinary filmmaker, who happens to be the mother of NYC’s new mayor, and think about intersections of art and politics, and how familial love might produce a buffer against the corrosive politics and cynicism of our time. My story about Mira Nair:

My weekly update. Some good(ish) news. The pace of NIH grantmaking appears to be picking up. 1/4

Microscopic marine organisms called forams began to proliferate relatively rapidly after the dino-killing asteroid struck Earth. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4rywh19

Unleashing live-cell imaging for the masses! Adapting the OpenFlexure Microscope for Affordable Live-Cell Imaging www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Fits into existing incubators for time-lapse experiments & feeds into existing bioimaging analysis pipelines. Thanks @wellcometrust.bsky.social funding

1/10 Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from? Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral RTs, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

𝘌. 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘪 chromosome replicationists take note 👇 tsutomu katayama's lab tackles one of the last remaining puzzles of DnaB loading by DnaA to 𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘊 after opening. for bi-directional replication, 𝘁𝘄𝗼 DnaB helicases have to be loaded (in case you forgot). thx for pointing this out, wiep 🙏 #MicroSky