In a series of workshops last year, we discussed the term ‘synthetic community’ and its usage. It’s so loosely defined and is regularly used to define something which in my eyes isn’t a SynCom. The discussion was also touching on whether the term itself is appropriate.

This week in our seminar, we're excited to host our own alumnus Corrine Best, who just started her new lab in the Volcani institute!

Excited to share my review in Nature Reviews Microbiology on soil fungal ecology. Fungal diversity, ecology and functions in soil ecosystems Hope people will find it useful! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats to Jamie A. Lopez and Amir Erez on this excellent new perspective in Environmental Microbiology! Very useful for anyone interested in how to apply mathematical modeling in microbiology. enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Our departmental seminar is back! This week:

Check out our new manuscript, in collab with Efrat Sheffer, Guy Dovrat and Amir Erez, where we looked at shotgun metagenomes of wild legume nodules, providing an unbiased view of the taxonomic genomic content of legume nodules, and how these relate to plant performance.

Thrilled to host @manuelkleiner.bsky.social for a week at @bengurionuniv.bsky.social for a MetaProteomics workshop! No better start than a seminar on "Advanced Metaproteomic Approaches To Investigate Functional Host-Microbiota Interactions." 🧬

The (Yoav) Voichek lab has opened its gates at the Weizmann Institute, and is actively recruiting students and researchers at all levels - come explore gene regulation and computational genomics in a fun, friendly sprouting lab 🤗🥼⚗️🧪 www.weizmann.ac.il/plants/voichek

In this week’s @science.org cover article, we discover tree bark is a hidden habitat for abundant, diverse, and specialized microbial life that actively regulate our climate 🦠. Bark isn't just an inert armor of tree but an active interface for climate and biodiversity www.science.org/eprint/7H9PX...

A four-year postdoc focusing on "plant growth-promoting bacteriophages" available in my group. Skills in metaviromics and metagenomics essential. Application deadline: 2.2.2026. For more info, see the link.

Happy to share our new work about the Bacillus-Trichoderma interactions. A new and interesting story😁

Our work now on @jxbotany.bsky.social. Make sure you add some Cas13a fluorescent virus detection to your Christmas lights ✨️

Don't miss Natanella Illouz-Eliaz' (Salk Institute) Community Dissemination of Arabidopsis Knowledge Award presentation “The World Around Us: Two Parallel Paths in Life"! youtu.be/Lqatc-yUpmY?... @natanellae.bsky.social

Bittersweet day in the lab as we said farewell to the amazing Noa Assaf, who just successfully defended her MSc thesis on drought-induced shifts in root exudation in desert plants.

Unexpected microbial rhodopsin dynamics in sync with phytoplankton blooms www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Grateful to share our paper on gene-specific selective sweeps in human gut microbiomes, now out in Nature! It has been a joy to work with @rwolff.bsky.social, whose insights and hard work made this possible. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hanukkah at the department 🕯️. A fun celebration organized by our awesome students. Happy holidays.

Super excited to have this paper out. We developed a complex set of ground truth samples to test more than 110 statistical approaches for differential #metaproteomics We can now give clear guidance on what tests perform well. Thank you Tjorven Hinzke and @benoitkunath.bsky.social for the leadership

academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc... Endophytic adaptation in Flavobacterium sp. 98 @xinyapan.bsky.social @vcarryon.bsky.social @gillesvanwezel.bsky.social ✌🏽 lysoPE story could be cool

Finally out! BBERT - an LLM that can detect bacterial reads using as little as 100 base pairs! Go try it! @amirerez.bsky.social @finkel-lab.bsky.social

This is such a cool paper as it experimentally addresses the role of the auxiliary metabolic gene nblA in cyanophages showing a large benefit of NblA to the cyanophage and a negative effect on the host photosynthetic apparatus and host photosynthesis www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🌊🦠🧪 Delighted to share this work now out in @isme-microbes.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1093/isme... The currency of microbial life is chemistry, but there’s so much still unknown about how metabolic interactions shape communities. 1/

@naturalist1986.bsky.social has done it again, this time with 3rd prize at the ISPS meeting in the beautiful Sde Boker. Poster title: A rhizobial trickster: Legume symbiont simultaneously fixes atmospheric nitrogen and denitrifies. Time to turn these posters into manuscripts.

This week in the HUJI PES seminar: @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social

🎉 Check out the latest from Qin Gu’s team at Nanjing Agricultural University: “Keystone Pseudomonas species in the wheat phyllosphere” (Cell Host & Microbe) 👉 www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

This week in the HUJI PES seminar: @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social

I'm thrilled to share our newest publication in @natmicrobiol.nature.com, led by Drs. @botanichole.bsky.social, Valéria Custódio, and David Gopaulchan: Precipitation legacy effects on #SoilMicrobiota facilitate adaptive drought responses in plants. 🌾 🧪 (thread) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Call for Applications for the Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship-2026-27 azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fell...

The first time we are hearing about viruses at #PMS2025, thanks @sheilaroitman.bsky.social!

Fascinating talk on how to optimize microbe-microbe interactions with Bacillus as the focal species.

I approve this message :)

Check out our latest preprint in which we describe a new phage plaque sequencing pipeline which lowers the cost of sequencing by up to 10-fold while significantly shortening the time required to obtain the phage genome sequences www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This week in the HUJI PES seminar: @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social

This week in the HUJI PES seminar: @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social

In plant-pathogen or plant-microbe interactions what is the proper null. - there is specific coevolution of any pathogen/microbe such that it was at least partly adapted to the host isolated. -the host of isolation may have not effected the pathogen in the slightest.

New pre-print from the team! The manuscript is @emma-raven.bsky.social's PhD work showing that whether a leaf is a carbon sink or a carbon source influences how they execute immune responses. Have a read! #PlantScience @johninnescentre.bsky.social

📣 New PhD student position opening in my lab! Soils are full of microbes, but how many are active? Surprisingly, we still lack reliable methods to answer this. If you are interested in microbial dormancy and are fascinated by the Alps and glacier forefields, contact me. 🏔️ 🦠 💤 🧬 🎓

Our paper, describing how the T6SSs of P. putida shape the tomato rhizosphere, is now in its final format in @isme-microbes.bsky.social ISME Communications. If you'd like to learn more, here is a thread (1/11) or read the Article doi.org/10.1093/isme....

Check out this preview @naturalist1986.bsky.social and I wrote about the fantastic paper on wood microbiota from Wyatt Arnold and colleagues: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Time-series metatranscriptomics reveals differential salinity effects on the methanogenic food web in paddy soil | mSystems journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

Unannotated translation products are widespread in model E. coli www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We've tried to take a different view at the issue of nutrient limitations-looking for the shared basis rather than for specific response. This is the result: www.jbc.org/article/S002... Led by Hagit Zer with Stav Chen and David Rasin, in close collaboration with Miguel Hernandez–Prieto. Thanks!

Very nice writeup on someone I've admired and learned from for many years. I didn't know he had passed until catching up on This Week in Microbiology driving to campus this morning. His 1958 paper on Salmonella growth rates basically founded the formal study of microbial physiology, which...

So excited to share this new paper by @sulheim.bsky.social and others! It's rare that you find a pattern, propose a hypothesis and the more you look, the more data you find that fits! Snorre's intuition, hard work and rigour to put it all together have been inspiring! Let us know what you think...

Out after peer review, collaborative study from Nordborg & Weigel labs with help from many others. Not the largest collection of new Arabidopsis thaliana genomes, but we hopefully put forward some good ideas for how to think about pangenomes and their analysis! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

From a gene’s single cell expression–through spatial localization–to novel function, and beyond! Now out @natplants.nature.com We built a comprehensive spatial-transcriptomic atlas of Arabidopsis, revealing cell-type identities across organs in unprecedented detail www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Why chocolate tastes so good: microbes that fine-tune its flavour www.nature.com/articles/d41...

In memory of Fabrice Rappaport. A myovirus encoding both photosystem I and II proteins enhances cyclic electron flow in infected Prochlorococcus cells www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#NatMicroPicks Hidden microbial world in trees🌳 Living wood hosts trillions of bacteria making trees a complex ecosystems with major roles in forest health and function. #PlantMicro #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...