Cell death is a fundamental mechanism of antiviral immunity across diverse organisms, including bacteria. As my final PhD project with @jbdsf.bsky.social, I was curious whether cell death is required for successful immunity with the ancient cGAS pathway known as ‘CBASS.’ Spoiler – the answer is no!

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...

Really excited to join Stanford ChemE this September! We'll engineer proteins in plant immune and hormone pathways, combining high-throughput directed evolution with ML. Our goal is to enhance climate stress resilience and disease resistance in crops: rim.stanford.edu

Must read for all who use Nicotiana benthamiana as a platform: “Causes and consequences of experimental variation in Nicotiana benthamiana transient expression” #plantscience www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We've identified a group of nucleases that can target multiple phages with hypermodified DNA, using a sensor domain present across many domains of life. We’ve even used this as a tool to find phages with hypermodified DNA! Really thankful to all the co-authors who have been such great help!

Excited to share that my work from the @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social lab is now on bioRxiv! With @benmorehouse.bsky.social, we discovered that the Panoptes defense system—named after the all-seeing watchman of Hera—uses decoy nucleotides to detect phage anti-defense proteins.

First post on Bluesky!! ☀️ Very happy to share that my main postdoc work ‘Systematic Discovery and Design of Synthetic Immune Receptors in Plants’ is finally out on Biorxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... The full story is summarized here:

This is excellent

In our latest review, we explore 12 deep-learning tools for metagenomic analysis, covering their strengths, limitations, and key applications. We hope it serves as both a resource and inspiration for new ways to analyze metagenomic data. Great work by Eli Levy Karin! 📄 doi.org/10.1093/nsr/...

New version of DefenseFinder available defensefinder.mdmlab.fr (& cli) Now encompassing 263 systems (+111 this year..!). Thanks @ftesson.bsky.social, DefenseFinder grandmaster. Full list of systems here: defense-finder-models/List_system_article.md at master · mdmparis/defense-finder-models

Nature research paper: Multi-interface licensing of protein import into a phage nucleus https://go.nature.com/3QdP5SJ

REVIEW: Design and regulation of engineered bacteria for environmental release by Chris Voigt & co #microsky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm very excited to share my first graduate research project! Check out our preprint which describes how data generated with directed evolution can be used to model the phenotypic effects of naturally-evolved sequence variants. (1/11) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm thrilled to announce our latest work is now published in Cell! Viruses encode numerous proteins that inhibit host defenses, but identifying immune-modulatory proteins among millions of viral sequences has been nearly impossible - until now! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...