Day 11 #SciArtSeptember prompt venomous: my linocut of a Portuguese Man o’ War floating at the surface of the sea. 🧪🐡 These are beautiful but deadly creatures, also known as bluebottles, resemble jellyfish but are actually colonial organisms called siphonophores. They are made up of many 🧵

10 - Tawny My participation in #SciArtSeptember has been a bit sporadic - chronic illness is messing with me. But here is one of my favourite animals, the Tawny Owl. Love to hear them calling to each other 🤎

5 - Corridor #SciArtSeptember A pastel sketch of a landscape based on a photo I took last year in the Alps. This region is rich in biodiversity and mountains can form important corridors for wildlife to travel.

4 - Riverbank Sketch of a grey heron with a fish in pastel pencil #SciArtSeptember

3 - Jewel Missed a couple of days of #SciArtSeptember but here is my attempt to join in with today's prompt. This is a pastel pencil drawing of a jewel beetle.

Not micro, but still nature 🍊

Bacterial cells

Bacteriophages, my muse

What do bacterial cells do when they run out of nutrients? Although most bacterial studies focus on cells in exponentially growing states, in the wild bacteria likely spend most of their time slowly starving to death. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I guess I hadn't posted this yet and didn't even know it had come out-- I was interviewed for (and co-wrote w/Daniel Rabosky) a Trends in Ecology & Evolution "TrendsTalk" article on "Disability in ecology and evolution" -- www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... #DisabledInSTEM #academicchatter #academia

Many people take "non-traditional" career paths in academia. My Leading Edge colleagues and I did! We wrote for PLOS Biology about how non-linear careers are increasingly common, but funding agencies and search committees penalize these paths. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

New paper alert! Really excited to see this work from a postdoc with Steve Votier @heriotwattuni.bsky.social published in Ecology & Evolution! In it, we use existing bio-logging data to study competition and facilitation in foraging gannets. Link to paper here: dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

Hello new phage phollowers! I am shamelessly self-promoting mine and Angus Buckling's relatively new review "Critically evaluating the relative importance of phage in shaping microbial community composition" www.cell.com/trends/micro...

Our paper on identifying novel origins of transfer by conjugation is out! One can now expand the known oriTs from 1% to 80% in species like Acinetobacter baumannii. This contributes to unravel hitcher plasmid mobility beyond model elements. #microsky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📢Calling all researchers! We are studying what makes a great (or not-so-great) supervisor from the perspective of PhD students and postdocs. Our goal? To improve academic mentorship and research environments. Got 5-10 minutes? Take the survey!✍️ forms.gle/WT9GoiaHxypX...

People at work seem to be enjoying my new sign (but are yet to feed the postdoc...) 🧪

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. But don’t give into despair. For those of us who cling to liberal values, moral principles, and the dignity of all people, there is much work to do.

TIR signaling activates caspase-like immunity in bacteria https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.24.620036v1

"Women are less likely to be named authors on any given document in all fields and at all career stages." "Women are credited less in science than men" Nature 608, p 135–145 (2022) Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm so happy to see the main part of my PhD work published in Cell Host & Microbe! We discover and characterise MADS (Methylation Associated Defense System) in its native host, a clinical isolate of 𝘗𝘴𝘦𝘶𝘥𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘴 𝘢𝘦𝘳𝘶𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘰𝘴𝘢 strain SMC4386 www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Really proud of our new guide to processing and exploring animal tracking data in R which has just been published in @animalecology.bsky.social! If you work with animal tracking data or have a student that does then please read and share! Lots of useful code and a shiny app for data vis!

I'm recruiting a Research Technician to work on plasmid transmission and antimicrobial resistance in St Andrews, to start in October. Deadline for applications is 19 June. Please share! www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

I often think about this in the context of leaving my 17-year long academic career...

New paper from the lab, the mysteries involving the genetic elements that move by being mobilized by other MGEs. Hitcher Genetic Elements are distinctive, ancient and diverse. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

Our paper on "The impact of phage and phage resistance on microbial community dynamics" is finally out in PLOS Biology! What a journey it's been to get here, and I couldn't have done it without my fab co-authors journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Now we have a bioinformatics PhD position In my group in Lund to work on the same fun #phage defence project! Read more and apply here: lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/... deadline March 5th

Join the fun! And stay tuned for a bioinformatics PhD position to work on the same project!

New from the lab. We were stuck studying plasmid mobility because we ignored most origins of transfer by conjugation. Using the occurrences of known oriT, we developed a method to find novel unrelated families. Works well. We now cover most conjugative plasmids of E coli, K pneumo & A baumannii.

LU-Fold is now available to researchers across Sweden! Curious about how high-throughput #AlphaFold folding of monomers and co-folding of complexes can help your research? Get in touch for a chat! medicine.lu.se/lu-fold

So it turns out no matter how much time you spend organising your reading list, you will eventually still have to actually read something?!

Just published a short blogpost briefly summarising my autumn birding in Sweden and looking forward to a year of local patch birding in 2024 - agullloverstravels.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/l...

Your student has my sympathy (hopefully he/she doesn't need it). Got a lot of those "this is just bioinformatics". Sad to see it still in 2023.

Guess the UK doesn’t want any postdocs or ECRs anymore 🫠 www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk...

Funded 4-year PhD opportunity with me based in St Andrews @SchoolofBiology. One of two projects on mobile genetic elements, antibiotics and defence systems. www.findaphd.com/phds/project... www.findaphd.com/phds/project... Please share & pass on to anyone interested!

Lund in the snow, the moon is a paid actor 🌝

A very short thread on how I imagine the different bacteria I work with as humans. Starting with E. coli:

💻🧫 New preprint: How accurately can we predict diverse phage bacteria-interactions from their genomes only ? We created a matrix of >38k phage-bacteria interactions to find out (=> AUROC 86%) & used our predictions to recommend tailored phage cocktails. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper! 📣 We looked at the prevalence of type VI secretion systems (T6SSs) across E. coli and characterised the systems present in renowned MDR lineages ST410 and ST131 www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... (1/2)

🦠 New preprint 🦠 Really happy to see this up on bioRxiv - my 1st as senior author & Lina’s 1st as first author 🎉 a double whammy. 📄 Antibiotic resistance alters the ability of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to invade the respiratory microbiome (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

At least it's just delayed! When I lived in Cornwall the train occasionally caught fire or they'd somehow lost it...

Unreasonably excited to have a new giant notebook and coloured pens for all my science ramblings

Unexpected morning jaunt to Borgarsparken to twitch the stunning Pallas’s Warbler found by Petter Olsson. Despite blustery conditions it gave excellent views and even called several times! A species that always feels like a lifer no matter how many you see and only a 25 min walk from home! #birding

New preprint on the evolution of natural transformation. We measured transformation rates in 100s of #Acinetobacter baumannii & #Legionella pneumophila. Key arising question: why are so many strains non-transformable if the many recent transitions to non-transformability seem deleterious? 1/4

First preprint 📢 on bsky: New work on the Wadjet defence system by @roisnehamelinf.bsky.social & @drhonsworth.bsky.social revealing beautiful & exciting structures of JET on plasmid DNA. With loop extrusion, obstacles, DNA bending, kinking, cleavage 🦠🧫 🧪 t.co/RaO7IO3zDk  With help from @DCI_Lausanne

Erm…this ain’t cool inews.co.uk/news/governm...

📣 Paper: We show that mutators can drive the evolution of multi-resistance to antibiotics, in cases where purely wild type populations can't This came out earlier this year while the other place was imploding But it's a story I'm proud of for many reasons... 1/n journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

A few things that I've needed to get off my chest for some time now. 🧪 🌋

Absolutely garbage puns on my end buuut: P1-unch Chi-pirinha Mu-jito PhiX-on the beach FelixO1d fashioned

Falling behind: postdocs in their thirties tire of putting life on hold Temporary contracts, low salaries and cost-of-living hikes force many researchers to put off parenthood and other big decisions. www.nature.com/articles/d41...