A sentence with AI and employment in it is rarely an uplifting one these days. Here’s the change. America’s Enterprising Spirit Is Booming After Decades-Long Slump www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/b...

Go in for the bugs, stay for the commentary.

New preprint! How do you engineer one of biology’s most complex enzymes without breaking it? We used evolution as a guide to map a protein interface in nitrogenase, screening >9,000 variants to reveal sequence-function rules for future nitrogen fixation engineering. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How ancient are the building blocks of animal sensory systems? Key components of animal sensory systems evolved before animals. We find that choanoflagellates possess diverse & spatially segregated TRP channels, pointing to ancient origins of sensory specialization. doi.org/10.64898/202...

A lot of work, over many years, and we finally see the missing piece at the heart of type 3 export!

The T6SS is a widespread nanoweapon deployed by #bacteria, but why is it deployed heterogeneously? @cascaleslab.bsky.social &co show that #Ecoli adopt distinct #T6SS attacker "ON" & defender "OFF" roles to optimize survival, a key strategy in microbial warfare @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3S5dL45

If you are at the 2026 ASM Microbe meeting in Washington DC, please check out a talk on sensory origion of zorbs by our lab's postdoc Jitendra Gosai at the 'Holding Tight: the importance of bacterial adhesion' session on June 5th @gosciee.bsky.social

Kickstarting #ASMicrobe in DC this morning. Feels great to be here! 🧵 for all the updates!

Bacterial transmembrane proteins usually localize inside the cell by "finding" a pre-localized protein, but how did the 1st protein get there? @vanipande.bsky.social found a protein in #B.subtilis that localizes by recognizing a *lipid* localization cue. #Microsky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

What is the scope of ISME Host Microbe, ISME's newest journal? Effects of antimicrobial agents, human activities, immunity and environment on AND ecological studies, cross-kingdom studies, microbiome studies of host-microbiome/microbe interactions academic.oup.com/ismehm/pages... #MicrobialEcology

Microbial cross-feeding interactions reshape evolutionary trajectories of consumers by preserving motility. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.25.727712v1

More scientists as political leaders please!

What a waste of food and perfectly useful furniture.

I went down the rabbit hole of finding more and found these peckers to be a fascinating species. The most mind-blowing part being:

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...

Me trying to reach "expansion" from "increase" via inflation, growth, enlargement and swelling. Could i just have asked Gemini or GPT - yes, but, where is the gaudiloquence in that?

#NatMicroPicks Baby-to-baby strain transmission shapes the developing gut microbiome - out now in Nature! 👶🦠👶 #microsky #microbiome @nature.com @cibiocm.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nature research paper: Construction of complex and diverse DNA sequences using DNA three-way junctions go.nature.com/4qu2ExZ

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)

We’ve discovered how the superbug E. faecalis prevents chronic wounds from healing. It’s not a toxin. It’s metabolism. The bacteria use extracellular electron transport (EET) to electrochemically generate ROS, effectively "freezing" skin cells in place. doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aeb5297

I've spent all day struggling to write a single page of a popular science article. I bang away at a word processor; give up; start diagramming on paper. Take some notes; draft a few sentences in pen; return to the computer...and very slowly I figure out what I was trying to say in the first place.

A 16h day in the lab comes to an end. An ambitious experiment, now in incubation, with about 700 ‘spots’ on those plates holding on to the answer of a curious question. With the finals over, the campus is as empty as devoid the air is of winter-y cold. It is somewhat of a good night, I guess.

A brand-new Gordon Conference on Microbiomes!🦠 The opening session (Jan 2026) dives into microbiome editing - how fundamental research and new technologies can advance human health and environmental sustainability. Super looking forward!🧪 #microsky #microbiomesky #grc www.grc.org/microbiome-e...

Reviewing an exciting manuscript. This is going to be a long night!

This morning, @isbscience.org's Dr. Mary Brunkow was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine! Dr. Brunkow shares the award with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi. Read the press release here: www.nobelprize.org/.../medicine.... What a tremendous honor! Congratulations!

Friday Papers Club! 🍿In light of Pubmed going down, the collapse of social media, and my recent success at getting recommendations for interesting papers from those still around, I am starting a new tradition! - Recommend a good scientific manuscript! 👇

Amazing work by @hueihsuantsai.bsky.social and colleagues from @nikogeldner.bsky.social, Feng Zhou @tonnigrubeandersen.bsky.social labs in Science Localized glutamine leakage drives the spatial structure of root microbial colonization www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #chemotaxis #MicroSky

Discovery of a new type of immune cell in fat tissue that promotes infllammaging (chronic inflammation with aging) www.nature.com/articles/d41... www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Join us in Arizona! The Fourth Annual Symposium on Mechanisms of Cellular Evolution will again be held at ASU. November 5-8, 2025, in Tempe, AZ. Theme: Unicellular Diversification of Cell Types and Division Systems. na.eventscloud.com/cmesymposium2025

Out now! 🍫🦠A defined microbial community reproduces attributes of fine flavour #chocolate fermentation By Gabriel Castrillo, David Salt & co #microsky #microbiomesky 🧪 Read it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#phagesky I am looking for phages infecting Streptococcus pneumoniae to test a phenotype - does anyone have some and willing to share ? Repost appreciated :)

On my 14th hour of troubleshooting the code while ChatGPT tells me we are close for the 280th time.

Site-specific DNA insertion into the human genome with engineered recombinases www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... in other words... genome engineering to precisely insert large multi-kilobase sequences into specific sites without introducing double-strand breaks #synbio

Internet Roadtrip is my favorite thing on the internet right now—it’s basically Twitch Plays Google Street View. They started in Boston, spent several weeks on a quest to cross the Canadian border, and are now exploring New Brunswick. neal.fun/internet-roa...

Started in Abhishek’s lab as a new postdoc without any coding skills, and now I've contributed to a bacterial-tracking library and debugged critical issues while at that - super happy with this. Thanks to all my more-hardworking-coauthors on this one! Cheers and here is to many more 🥂.

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Me: I was waiting for the Argon laser to warm up

TaxonKit v0.20.0 is adapted to recent rank changes in NCBI Taxonomy. github.com/shenwei356/t... Also updated - taxid-changelog to May, 2025 github.com/shenwei356/t... - gtdb-taxdump to GTDB r226 github.com/shenwei356/g... - ictv-taxdump to VMR_MSL40 github.com/shenwei356/i...

New 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘔𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘦 🦠 Personalized Nebulized Bacteriophage Therapy for MDR 𝘗𝘴𝘦𝘶𝘥𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘴 Infections in Cystic Fibrosis In 9 patients, 10²–10⁴ CFU/mL drop in sputum bacteria, 6% median gain in FEV1 Post-treatment isolates showed trade-offs—reduced virulence, increased antibiotic susceptibility

Do people in the same household share strains when they have the same species? How many cells transmit when a strain is shared? Can strain composition be dynamic when species composition is stable? We answer these and related questions for the facial skin microbiome in our latest paper. 🧵[1/10]

Some insect larvae have been incorporating microplastics into the casings they build to protect themselves against predators since at least the early 1970s, researchers report. scim.ag/3GD5SNx

A trial has drawn links between fibromyalgia and alterations of the gut microbiome https://go.nature.com/3EDZxkv

Fascinating innate immune evasion strategy in SCIENCE #glycotime 𝘗𝘴𝘦𝘶𝘥𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘴 𝘴𝘺𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘢𝘦 makes GLYCOSIRIN, a novel iminosugar that blocks plant glycosidases from degrading bacterial flagellin—hiding pathogens from plant immune sensors. New cryo-EM insights reveal exactly how this stealthy trick works

Mapping genetic diversity with the GenomeIndia project Nature Genetics www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Delighted to share that @asm.org has met its goal for all of its 'legacy' journals (ie favorites like J. Bact, I&I, AEM) so ALL 2025 articles will be published open access. Thanks to all institutional subscribers, this is the S2O way. Please submit to these great journals! asm.org/Press-Releas...

A paper in Nature presents a temporary pacemaker smaller than a grain of rice capable of mediating effective cardiac pacing in animal models and human heart tissues. https://go.nature.com/3E4Trt6 #medsky 🧪

"... the space researcher was selected at random for a search... ...There, his personal mobile phone and work computer were confiscated and searched by authorities, with messages discussing Trump's treatment of scientists found on his device." www.lbc.co.uk/world-news/d...

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064