uniQure company reports gene therapy clinical trial results showing that miRNA-like silencing of the huntingtin gene slowed progression of the Huntington’s disease by 75% after three years. The miRNA is delivered by AAV via a neurosurgery. Amazing. I don't hold their stocks...

Quite insane if true

A recent cool preprint by John Whitney's lab on a new family of antibacterial proteins secreted by Gram-positive bacteria that enter and kill a broad spectrum of bacteria. Cell entry is receptor-independent and relies on cleavage by a co-secreted protease and the PMF. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

40 years ago Eyal Bartov took a picture of one of the last beautiful leopards in Israel, resting next to the dead sea. Unfortunately they have probably gone extinct in Israel. The last one was seen in 2007.

Shana Tova. Happy new Jewish year. Wishin for a scientifically productive and a peaceful year, with normal leadership around the world.

With the depressing reality of the ongoing horrible war (including a mssile alarm during the ceremony) there is a small moment of joy: Three students from the lab received MSc degrees today: Ofir Segev, summa cum laude Aleks Danov, magna cum laude Avital Akerman, magna cum laude #uberProudPI

Keyser Söze was introduced 30 years ago.

On this week, 40 years ago, my friend Ralph Isberg, then a postdoc with Stan Falkow, reported the discovery of the 1st invasin gene in @nature.com "We report here the identification of a single genetic locus from this organism (Y. pseudotuberculosis) that is sufficient to convert the innocuous

Lab's 7th birthday, farewell to summertime in Palmahim beach.

Are you interested in joining our lab as a molecular microbiologist postdoc fellow to study new antimicrobial proteins or new bacterial genes that facilitate adaptation to different hosts? Check out The Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program which offer generous funding. zuckermanstem.org

By Alex Taubin

We covered the highly elegant Gamma-Mobile-Trio paper in our lab's journal club. Highly recommended reading, by my colleagure @drdorsalomon.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exciting to see our protein binder design pipeline BindCraft published in its final form in @Nature ! This has been an amazing collaborative effort with Lennart, Christian, @sokrypton.org, Bruno and many other amazing lab members and collaborators. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tens of thousands in Tel Aviv are calling to stop the war and return of all hostages after nearly 700 days.

Without googling (or chatGPTing...): How many countries in Europe have total fertility rate above the replacement rate? (2.1 births per woman)

"IN SILICO DRUG DISCOVERY FOR NDM -1 METALLO β LACTAMASE INHIBITORS for KLEBSIELLA PUEUMONIAE" Add "GREAT" to the title and you'll have Trump's 1st manuscript

On our next microbiology journal club I will host Dr. Frederik Schulz @fmschu.bsky.social‬ from JGI and LBNL, California. Title: Frontiers in Discovery of New Lineages of Life huji.zoom.us/j/8502937529... Meeting ID: 850 2937 5290 Passcode: 337074 Monday, Aug 25th 9:00 Israel time

The crowd is growing. Reported 400K protesters in Tel Aviv Credit: Yair Palti

4 years ago I was honored to host the legendary Elio Schaechter in the microbiology journal club, when he was only 93 yo... Elio told us about very peculiar microbes that travel 1 mm/sec, reside inside mitochondria, ride a microbial bus...He named my kids who also joined "micro microbiologists" RIP

A nice experiment in mindsharing on X platform. Neriya Fisch uploaded two pics of a relatively light and heavy weight objects seen here. Dozens of people estimated their weights. The Ferari and helicopter's mean estimated weight were 10% and 17% below and above the real weights, respectively.

Archaea are often surrounded by bacteria. But is there ever active conflict between the two? Can archaea kill bacteria? If so, how do they do it? Work by @romainstrock.bsky.social shows that some archaea can kill bacteria by secreting peptidoglycan hydrolases. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

A great study!

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Pretty amazing. The extracellular injection system (what I call: "T6SS understudied cousin") can inject both proteins and ssDNA into target cells. Quite useful for biotech applications. Another great job from Joe Krietz from Feng Zhang's lab.

Not sure how many scientists here have tried Claude Code or similar command line coding assistants. I had a complicated family property tax problem that was best solved by a brute force Monte Carlo simulation approach, so I spent a few days coding up and analyzing a model with Claude Code.

From our amazing hike in Stubai Hohenweg

Solly Levi is an amazing photographer.

I try to keep this account free of politics. However, I'd like to emphasize that most of my friends in Israeli academia are not our stupid, radical, and violent government. I hope to change it in the next elections. Wishing for peace. As was acheived in former Yoguslavia, Northern Ireland, Rwanda.

Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal go.nature.com/3UITVts

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice" The wonderful beginning of 100 years of solitude Stubai slowly vanishing glacier

Ubercool

Stubai High Trail, Austria

No Tsunami warning in North Dakota 🤯

I was promoter to an Associate Prof. with tenure today. I am grateful to my beloved family, past and present students I was lucky to work with, great colleagues and collaborators. I wish my father Amos was still alive to share with me this joyful moment. It would have made him proud.

I don't remember observing so many professors per square meter outside a conference, as in tonight's demonstration against the war and our government. For one of them, who is an editor and a permanent drummer in the demonstrations, I still owe sending a peer review report...

Expression level of anti-phage defence systems controls a trade-off between protection range and autoimmunity By Nitzan Aframian and Avigdor Eldar. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A recent paper reveals that while LPS deficiency shields bacteria from phage infection (they lack receptor), it heightens vulnerability to T6SS contact-dependent antagonism, highlighting a critical evolutionary constraint. by @seeyeunting.bsky.social www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Scientists and engineers could: Sequence the human genome Put a man on the moon Invent the internet Solve protein folding problem Decipher the complex immune system. But fail to design a poster session in which you can actually hear the presenter. In nearly every meeting out there.

Ilana Kolodkin-Gal talks about her late mentor Prof. Hanna Engelberg-Kulka who discovered the first TA system carried on bacterial chromosomes (MazEF) in 1996 at #ISM2025. MazE = "what is it?"... in Hebrew As they didn't know their gene function in the beginning.

Lab's first PhD graduate, the amazing Alex Geller! Now he's doing exciting comp. bio. reseaech in the industry. #ProudPI

New Tansley review out in @newphyt.bsky.social with @fdiniandreote.bsky.social and Gabriel Castrillo! We explore how the root is shaped by dialogue with soil microbes—highlighting emerging mechanisms and future research directions in root plasticity and microbiome interactions. tinyurl.com/38mkyx5t

📢 New preprint alert! We used comparative genomics on 72,000+ bacterial genomes to uncover the genetic basis of microbial adaptation to multicellular hosts—plants and animals alike. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

GRC Applied and Environmental Microbiology was great! Thanks @deniseakob.bsky.social @environmicrobio.bsky.social and @thuls.bsky.social for organizing a wonderful scientific meeting. Looking forward to the next one!

@environmicrobio.bsky.social Roland is doing the cool Volta experiment: concentrating methane produced by methanogens. #GRCAEM

I wonder if adaptation to high levels of lead can be detected in old environmental microbial isolate genomes from the time leaded gasoline was prevalent in the US.

רגעים ושעות שקפאו במקום... פעם ראשונה לקחתי את הילד לראות את האגדה

Project objective as described in WP1 of the research grant: to draw a woman sitting in armchair. Pablo Picasso, 1938, final scientific report: