I'm looking for an enthusiastic student to join my team as a PhD candidate on archaeal genome evolution 🦠💻 Work in beautiful Utrecht, at @binfutrecht.bsky.social, an international group full of caring, amazing scientists, and with frequent cake breaks! www.uu.nl/en/organisat... Please share! 🙏

Montréal > Toronto, summed up nicely by a French expat living in toronto and visiting mtl (fully unbiased)

New Work out! A multilayered network reveals the centrality of newly discovered #Nucleocytoviricota in wastewater treatment plant communities w/ @dominikluecking.bsky.social & @amanzanom.bsky.social doi.org/10.64898/202... @erc.europa.eu @univie.ac.at @dome-vienna.bsky.social 1/4

Ancient wars between microbes gave us key immune defenses | @science.org | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti... #microsky #virosky #immunosky

Like a prophage being awakened from its slumber, the phage field has seen a lot of renewed activity during the last decade. Check out our new @natrevmicro.nature.com review on the temperate phage life cycle here to stay up-to-date 🧫🦠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🎊 New Preprint from phagefoundry.org ! Super excited to share our latest work on generating systematic phage-MDR P. aeruginosa interaction dataset & use of ML to predict phage susceptibility & phage cocktails from target genome sequences alone, w validations www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Beyond thrilled that our paper ‘Co-migration of hundreds of microbial species over metres drives selection and promotes non-motile hitchhikers’ has been accepted in Nature Communications! 🎉🦠 (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Game over, phylogeneticists! New DNA foundation model "Carbon" reconstructs the tree of life. 🙃 huggingface.co/spaces/Huggi...

What is it with "dossiers"? My Claude Code has become obsessed with using the word dossier to describe any kind of report or summary document. Curious if this is something that just leaked into my context and propagated, or if it got imprinted upstream at the RLHF stage. Anyone else see this?

Question: anyone struggle with Streptococcus pneumoniae growth in plasticware? Eliminated almost every other variable and it's lovely in glass but terrible in polystyrene plates. Anyone observed, got a mechanism or a fix? Driving us potty!

Are gut phages friends or foes? A nice "forum" in Cell Host&Microbe by @naamagz.bsky.social discussing it's all about context. Depending on host inflammation and ecology, phages can shift between stabilizing and destabilizing our microbiome. www.cell.com/cell-host-mi... #phagesky

Today @who.int declared a PHEIC—a public health emergency of international concern—for the Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in DRC/Uganda without convening an Emergency Committee. That is unprecedented. The situation is catastrophic. Six experts explain why: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKag...

Come See our Grad Student @astrobio-agb.bsky.social this week at #AbSciCon2026. She'll be presenting her research on how desert microbes can literally drink water vapor from the air! 🌵💧 #Microbiology #Extremophiles #Desiccation #Astrobiology

I'm looking for postdoc opportunities for the 2026-2027 academic year. If you're looking for a postdoc with a broad skill set spanning evolutionary genetics, bioinformatics, and various omics methods, feel free to reach out. Some recent pubs: (1) doi.org/10.1126/scie... (2) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Writeup of recent Chesapeake Area Viral Ecology meetup held at the Colwell Center in Baltimore, organized by @beckettstephen.bsky.social, Tapan Goel, @juliepourtois.bsky.social + Eric Schott, with 30+ engaged in dialogue on ways to explore viral impacts in a vital regional and national resource.

Meet @jacksumner22.bsky.social👋 Jack earned his PhD at Northwestern University with @ericamhartmann.bsky.social, where he used systems biology approaches to study the lung microbiome during severe pneumonia. As a postdoc in the Huttenhower Lab, he’s now exploring the human virome and phage function.

🍫🦠 Chocolate isn’t just chemistry—it’s microbiology. From yeasts to acetic acid bacteria, microbes drive fermentation & create chocolate’s flavor, aroma & complexity. See how scientists are decoding and designing chocolate flavor at the microbial level. asm.org/articles/202...

The paper on my Ph.D. work is fully online! We used a ribozyme that barcodes 16S rRNA to track the transduction range of phage P1 in a synthetic community and real wastewater communities, while diving deeper into the unique range conferred by P1s two tail fibers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Vibriophiles! Achtung! Come to Berlin Sept 13-16 to learn the latest about your favorite bacteria. Great speakers, great venue, great topics, great location (home of Robert Koch). Oral abstract deadline June 15. Please share. @asm.org @rki-de.bsky.social #Vibrio26 #VIS

Tiny Mystery Plasmid Noteworthy — A two-gene plasmid is abundant and highly prevalent in human gut microbiomes.

Today we are launching the @target-amr.bsky.social flexible funding initiative to pump prime new research across disciplines in the broad field of AMR genomics. Introduction by @ksbakes.bsky.social at #TARGetAMR26 Flexible Funding – TargetAMR share.google/bWYYdQUo8azy...

“Let me start with what worked…the part of the story most Americans do not know. The Nebraska biocontainment unit now holding our returning passengers is a Level 1 Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center… the highest tier of a national network built specifically for moments like this.”

Excellent thread, read it all #episky #idsky #medsky

Years. Definitely years.

Been a bit behind in our posts off late! So thrilled to host Dr Catherine Mageeney from the @sandialabs.bsky.social for a guest seminar in our gigantic general #microbiology class and for our #Phage #Pathways cohort earlier last week! 🙏 we loved learning about #mobilegeneticelements and #waxworms!

Version 4. Spanish case added. Latest version pinned to the top of my timeline.

With Eugene Koonin, we wrote a rather comprehensive review on the origin, evolution and organization of the #virosphere. We describe all 10 viral realms and the logic behind them, and so much more. Check it out! comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/biologies/ar...

Upshot: the pangenome is the inevitable solution to prokaryotic life under uncertainty. "Accessory" implies dispensable. The framework says they are essential, just not to every cell in every generation. A gene rarely needed is not a gene unneeded. It is insurance.

The Andes variant has been sequenced and publically shared. I leave it to virologists to dissect this first. virological.org/t/co... 1/2

It's funny how we stigmatize being wrong in science. There's nothing better in science than being wrong and getting to change your mind about something. Any day you were wrong is a day you get to learn something new!

“At a time when advances in AI and data science are transforming how science is done, LBNL is uniquely positioned to lead. I look forward to working with the lab’s extraordinary community to deliver those solutions.” – Kathy Yelick @uofcalifornia.bsky.social

IQ-TREE 3: Phylogenomic Inference Software using Complex Evolutionary Models academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Lots of people have reached out asking how they can support us after the devastating fire in the MSL building, the heart of @cmarinescience.bsky.social Here’s one way, a GoFundMe organized by our graduate students - gofund.me/4373c6ff3. Please share widely, and thanks for helping our community!

Want to find #prophage in your #bacteria genomes? We built PhiSpy a long time ago, and now we've created a new web page for it: linsalrob.github.io/PhiSpyWeb/ Best of all, the data never leaves your computer! #phage #phagesky

The Bisson Lab at IU (bissonlab.com) is hiring makers/builders/engineers across all career stages to join our team in one of the most exciting and crazy projects I've set to work on. Candidates can email us: [email protected] More info in the thread [1/3]

I’m thrilled to share an update to our work on bacterial NACHT domain containing proteins! In our last preprint, we reported that bNACHT11 is activated by multiple phage proteins. We’ve now expanded this work with structural insight and investigation of programmed cell death following activation.

Come and work with me at @universityofotago.bsky.social Review of apps begins 21 May www.linkedin.com/posts/te-pun...

Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology & Evolution are open! Our lab is open to hosting applicants. We link cell-level decision making to ecological outcomes and evolutionary trajectories in microbiomes. Interested or know someone who might be? Let's chat! www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

Re-posting this as we’ve still not found any parallels #MicroSky

This one means a lot. Our paper, “Large extrachromosomal replicons are widespread across bacterial lineages and show coordinated replication termination and spatial coupling with the chromosome,” is out! doi.org/10.1038/s414...

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

Happy to announce the defense of PhD student Cody Martin tomorrow, May 1, at 3 pm CST for his thesis titled "Decoding the language of viral genomes with evolutionary-scale, context-aware genome language models". Talk is open to public - Email me for zoom link. #phagesky #microsky #Microbiomesky

Simons Graduate Fellowship Applications are open! If you're applying to Ph.D. programs in ecology and/or evolution this year, or if you're an incoming Ph.D. student who won't start your degree program until Fall 2026 or later, apply! www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

The Barrick & Lenski Labs in Dept of Microbiology, Genetics, & Immunology at Michigan State Univ seek a Research Assistant II to manage their research operations and participate in projects related to microbial evolution and synthetic biology. See details below. careers.msu.edu/jobs/researc...

Really proud to have been a part of this!

#microsky #phagesky Review on #phage tail-like structures www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 We’re looking for a PhD student to join @phimresearch.bsky.social and explore phages in emerging rice epidemics 🌾 We will investigate phage–bacteria interactions and the seed microbiome/phageome. #phd #phage #plantscience #microbiome #scijobs ‪ 👉 More info: tinyurl.com/yhc2fa7

We are thrilled to announce the election of 120 members and 25 international members to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continued achievements in original research. Congratulations to our new #NASmembers and welcome to the Academy! 🎊

ASM's Mechanism Discovery Unit, focused on advancing research into the basic principles of microbial life, has launched! The unit is led by Glen McGugan, Ph.D., & Alison Criss, Ph.D., & guided by a Scientific Advisory Council of 14 experts. Read more: asm.org/press-releas...

Here are the 11 phages the Innovation Academy STEM High School second year biotech kids discovered this year.