PIWI clade Argonautes are essential for transposon silencing. Without them, animals are sterile due to massive transposon activity. But how does piRNA-guided target interaction translate into silencing? PhD student Júlia Portell Montserrat has an intriguing answer www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Delighted to review the latest findings on how malaria parasites get into our blood cells and how we might stop it!

What was antibiotic resistance like before we ever used antibiotics? How did we change what antibiotic resistance genes looked like over 100 years? Our paper looking at resistance genes from a century of NCTC historical isolates now out in mGen: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Very proud of our paper on "scrambling-by-hopping" LADs, which was just published: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Congrats to Lise Dauban and the rest of the team – this was a real tour-de-force!

📢 New preprint alert! We designed synthetic proteins that can block bacterial immune systems, allowing phages + plasmids to overcome natural defenses. This could transform phage therapy + genetic engineering. Here’s what we found 🧵 Preprint🔗: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint reveals bacteria can't just collect all resistance genes like Pokemon cards. We found mutually exclusive evolutionary pathways to multidrug resistance in E. coli & P. aeruginosa - some resistance mechanisms actively prevent others from coexisting www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Day 3 of popgen we talked about effective population size. No, I don't really understand it. You probably don't either. But I highly recommend this fantastic guide about how to think about Ne onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

OH COME ON

I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.

After a quarter of a century, the UCSC Genome Browser remains an essential tool for navigating the genome and understanding its structure, function and clinical impact https://go.nature.com/40wPxkB

If you have ever wondered what might happen to short chain fatty acids made by the microbiome. Here is a large class of metabolites and how they link to biology. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

"The husband-and-wife team worked out how microbes – including those that cause TB and measles – can stow away in tiny droplets that we release even when only quietly breathing. Air currents can keep these aloft for hours, and in an unventilated room, other people can readily breathe them in."

TF binding is usually anticorrelated with DNA methylation, but there are very few studies that actually investigate why. This is really nice work from Jacques Drouin's lab showing PAX7 physically interacts with UHFR1, blocking DNMT1 recruitment ‪@ircm.bsky.social‬ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Way back in the mists of time, when Tw*tter was still useful, you could make a widget that you embedded in a webpage, and any tweet with a certain hashtag would end up being shown on the page. Can any @bsky.app @support.bsky.team wizards tell me if it's possible to do the same here?

Even with all the current uncertainty, we still have to get our papers out.

I wrote an email in a work thread a couple of days ago that was so informative that today's meeting on the topic has been cancelled as it's "no longer necessary". You don't catch lightning in a bottle like that every day.

🧬📝🚨 Out today: A genomics learning framework for undergraduates We hope this will be one more tool to help integrate genomics into undergraduate education by supporting evidence-based curriculum design with a set of standardized concepts. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Researcher: "We let the data speak for itself." Earlier that day:

It's been known for a while that interbreeding with Neanderthals introduced immune response gene alleles into modern humans that increase resistance to some viruses. Looks like it may have been more important than we realised. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Oh, great. African trypanosomes can evolve to remove dependency on tsetse for transmission. www.nature.com/articles/s41...