How do GWAS and rare variant burden tests rank gene signals? In new work @nature.com with @hakha.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and our wonderful coauthors we find that the key factors are what we call Specificity, Length, and Luck! 🧬🧪🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The 5th of 6 faculty positions in UNC Biology is posted. We're working with the @ncbg.bsky.social to fill a joint position as Director of the UNC Herbarium at @ncbg.bsky.social and as Associate Professor within the Department of Biology (BIOL). Please share 1/n unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/308...

Widespread horizontal transfer and strong selection enhance microbial adaptation in Antarctic soils www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs

@prczhaoyansong.bsky.social’s deep dive into the dark matter of compost communities is now out 🎉 Genomic islands hijack jumbo phages—whose capsids enable transfer of large tracts of DNA—shedding new light on the scale & scope of phage-mediated gene flow 😎 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

If you admix barcodes in your Illumina library, use Demulticoder: An R Package for the Simultaneous Analysis of Multiplexed Metabarcodes | Phytopathology® apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/10.1094/...

A one-of-a-kind repeated natural experiment. Population Genomic Analysis of Two Independent Clonal Invasions of the Sudden Oak Death Pathogen into One Forest | Phytopathology® apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/10.1094/...

New paper with my (amazing) friend and mentor @jrpenades.bsky.social Really looking forward to see what plasmid aficionados think of this one!! With @asantoslopez.bsky.social @wfigueroac3.bsky.social Akshay Sabins and others www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Still a couple of formatting things that need fixing (this is a "pre-proof") but our genomes paper is now available online! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Really happy to see it out there, I hope people find it useful/interesting!

job alert: UC Davis is looking to hire a 9 month tenure-track Assistant Professor of Mycology in the Department of Plant Pathology. More details below, for full consideration submit by 1 December 2025 recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07339

This is first paper from a new line of research in my lab, with more to come soon. If interested in PDPs I highly recommend this @baym.lol paper www.nature.com/articles/s41... and this classic from Matti Jalasvuori royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

UNC Chapel Hill is hiring an Assistant Professor in Plant Molecular Biology. Per Jeff Dangl MPMI candidates are also highly desired in the search. unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

Here’s published version of our manuscript using GWAS to investigate tailocin sensitivity in Pseudomonas syringae. TL:DR pretty clear LPS is tailocin receptor but also that P.syringae often completely swaps out its entire O antigen biosynth pathway w/ recombination academic.oup.com/g3journal/ad...

Chromosome architecture affects virulence and competitiveness in Agrobacterium tumefaciens C58 | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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

First publication from our lab!

ZmHSCF1 enhances Agrobacterium-mediated transformation frequency in commercial maize inbred lines by promoting embryogenic callus proliferation #correspondence #PlantCommunications cell.com/plant-commun...

The NSF GRFP is now limited to undergrads and first-year grads drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/t...

Dual transposon sequencing profiles the genetic interaction landscape in bacteria | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Delighted to see our paper studying the evolution of plasmids over the last 100 years, now out! Years of work by Adrian Cazares, also Nick Thomson @sangerinstitute.bsky.social - this version much improved over the preprint. Final version should be open access, apols. Thread 1/n

Interested in #virulence? Not sure what it is - or how to explain it? Just curious? 🧐🦠🧬🦋 @kayla-king.bsky.social and I just wrote a Primer for @currentbiology.bsky.social on the ecology and evolution of virulence! Check it below and share :) #MicroSky #EvoSky #pathogens

My department at UC Davis is hiring a mycologist, broadly interpreted. Please repost, share, and consider applying. recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07339

This promises to be a great read! “the pathogenicity island was horizontally transferred from Yersinia pestis to E. coli and other Enterobacterales approximatively 4,800 years ago” ⏩️ it then spread to Klebsiella and positively selected over the last 100 yrs ago

Call for a tenure-track position at our Department of Plant Molecular Biology in Lausanne! We are searching for promising early-career researchers in the broad field of plant-organismal interactions. Deadline: November 30, 2025 - Please re-post! career5.successfactors.eu/career?caree...

How many chromosomes can an animal have? In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact. www.cell.com/current-biol...

The Department of Biology at Colorado State University is hiring an Assistant Professor in the area of plant-microbe interactions! Please spread the word! jobs.colostate.edu/postings/165...

Super excited about this new Open Rank tenure-track faculty search for the MSU Plant Resilience Institute. We successfully hired two excellent new faculty in our last search and we are hoping to build on that success with this search. careers.msu.edu/jobs/assista...

Feel free to reach out to any of us here at GT if you have questions! On bluesky: me, @wcratcliff.bsky.social, @benjaminfreeman.bsky.social, @sepl.bsky.social, @seananderson.bsky.social, @digglelab.bsky.social, and everyone else here: biosciences.gatech.edu/people

For anyone who has used pling for comparing plasmids using rearrangement distances ("how many structural events apart are these plasmids"), here's how to tweak parameters, and integrate it with typing info, and the host phylogeny www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... github.com/iqbal-lab-or...

This true also of figure legends. "The Sky is Blue" not " "Graph showing principal colours of things above your head"

Sequence data from the new Ebola outbreak in DRC suggests it is indeed a new spillover. And just incredible to see the virus sequenced and the data publicly shared less than 24 hours after confirmation of the outbreak. #IDsky 🧪 virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

Very happy to share our latest work “Systematic discovery and engineering of synthetic immune receptors in plants” out in @science.org ! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

My department is hiring a Plant-Fungal Assist Prof!! As the newest #NewPI here, don't get me started on how wonderful my colleagues, how smooth my onboarding has been, how supportive the school and the department are, how nice my brand new lab is, and how convenient living in Champaign Urbana is!

Excited to share our new publication, out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41.... @kanchanj.bsky.social led this fascinating fungal-bacterial interaction project. We are grateful for our wonderful collaborators Brian Peters and David Underhill.

Biology never ceases to amaze!

The Weisberg Lab at Oregon State University is recruiting a postdoctoral scholar in molecular microbiology to study mobile genetic element host range and transmission in microbial communities. Please see the full job description here: files-dev.cqls.oregonstate.edu/Weisberg_Lab...

Multiple ecology faculty positions at @notredame.bsky.social. Apply at apply.interfolio.com/171650. (1/2). 🌎🌐🧪

MSU Plant Bio is hiring a new herbarium director! Our herbarium is a wonderful resource on campus and I'm excited to have the opportunity to make it even better by bringing in a new director. Details here: plantbiology.natsci.msu.edu/job-postings...

🍄 UGA Plant Pathology is hiring TT faculty in Mycology/Fungal Biology/Fungal Ecology at the Asst/Assc level! Please pass along this opportunity to anyone you know who may be interested. I'm on the search committee and happy to answer questions. 🍄 www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/445...

This work is finally published! 🥳🧬 Plasmids are associated with very variable fitness costs in their different bacterial hosts. But, what is the contribution of each of the plasmid-genes in these host-specific effects? Study led by @jorgesastred.bsky.social, @sanmillan.bsky.social and myself! 1/14

Super cool! Love the gif highlighting marginal trees along the arg!

Isn't genetics cool??? Within only 145 nucleotides(!) of a non-coding RNA (RNU4-2) - different variants in distinct regions / structures cause three distinct disorders!!! (all discovered within the last 18 months) 🤯🤓🧬❤️

💥🥳 At long last, our latest paper is out! Gag proteins of endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Led heroically by Sylvia Chang & @jonowells.bsky.social A study which has changed the way I think of #transposons! No less! 🧵 1/n

If you ever find yourself needing evidence for ‘Plasmids are just as common in microbes without resistance genes,’ we’ve got you covered! Check our new paper, out today: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

This looks like an amazing tool www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Come join our department, it is a great place to be and work! See the quoted thread for more details.

Come be our colleague! See the thread for more details on the position.

Day 2 of Popgen is also where I say “Please look at your kinship matrix.”Probably the best summary of pop structure there is, identifies problems or weird stuff in the data, and avoids pitfalls of structure-like plots and PCA.

90% of doing science is being open to new ideas.

Reported in this @newphyt.bsky.social study: nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Two plasmid‐borne virulence genomic islands of Clavibacter michiganensis are genetically diverse and determine the development of wilt symptoms in host plants - Hwang - New Phytologist - Wiley Online Library