Our new Microbial Primer describes the mechanistic action and therapeutic potential of R-pyocins produced by P. aeruginosa. www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

"There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs." Ending road deaths will be one of the greatest public health wins. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

I can't stay quiet about what RFK jr is doing to the CDC and FDA: stevensalzberg.substack.com/p/dont-trust...

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

What is the best strategy to win any contest? Eliminate your opponents of course. Recently, my friend @fernpizza.bsky.social showed how plasmids compete intracellularly (check out his paper published in Science today!). With @baym.lol, we now know they can fight. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things: (1) Are the claims interesting/important? (2) Does the evidence support the claims? Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

My former mentor, colleague, and friend Hamilton Smith passed away this week. He was a giant in science, a Nobel Laureate, but also one of the nicest people you could ever meet. He will be missed by many. www.jcvi.org/media-center...

1/10 Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from? Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral RTs, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Picture how big the Hoover Dam is. An absolute unit. The Hoover Dam has a power capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW). The solar farm that the Admin just cancelled could have produces 6.2 GW of power. That's more than 3 Hoover Dams.

Seems I'm not good at Bactopia v4 progress updates! Since my last update: - Nextflow v25+ compatible - Converted to nf-test - nf-bactopia plugin released If you are interesting in testing (very much appreciated!), I now have a dev build available here: github.com/bactopia/bac...

This was a powerful speech by Pope Leo which built on Pope Francis’ teaching legacy. He criticised those who “have chosen to deride the increasingly evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming”. It was a privilege to be in the room. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It’s #MythBustingMonday. Today’s myth: “Multiple vaccines at once will overload a child’s immune system.” This idea is popular with anti-vaccine groups and also POTUS. But immunology, decades of research, and real-world data all say the same thing: it’s false. 🧵

Phenomenal. In my 10 year update of A Brief History, I make the point that in the first edition, not one disease had been successfully treated using gene therapy. Today that number is at least 7.

Good luck with your new adventure!

I had to triplecheck this because I didn't believe it... All of the world's discovered reserves of fossil fuels = the same energy as just 5 days of sunlight hitting the Earth🤯 Solar power is basically unlimited🤷‍♂️

Proud of the work in this new preprint from my postdoctoral research. We used experimental evolution of mutualistically cross-feeding yeast to test how generalized interactions alter benefit evolution and opportunities for coevolution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1....

Delighted to see the first version of our new ELife paper. A collaboration with Levi Morran, we show how an intact antibiotic resistance gene (mecA) changes the course of S. aureus evolution on a new host. Kudos to Michelle Su and Kim Hoang for making this happen. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

“Well I don’t like that study because it doesn't give me the result I want’

During the day yesterday in California, >75%of all electricity was produced by renewable #energy, including solar. After the sun went down, half of all electricity STILL came from renewables, including wind batteries, hydro, geothermal, etc.

A BLAST update adding support for compressed files and csv output with headers is a Good Friday night surprise! blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/doc/blast-ne...

In under 24h following the newly identified outbreak of #Ebola in the DRC, the virus has been isolated, sequenced and the virus sequence data made publicly available. virological.org/t/the-16th-e...

Ok this is mad "...an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species. In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wow, more than 2.4M of assembled bacteria in the new release of ABT! We plan to index these using our efficient colored De Bruijn graph index, Fulgor. We recently conducted experiments with nearly 1M genomes…getting there :) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The data shows that the future will be electric & renewable ... 🧪🔌💡☀️💨🌊🔋 The global energy transition is underway. And that is good for #Climate #Environment #PublicHealth #Economics interactive.carbonbrief.org/factcheck/so...

Fantastic news - congratulations!

Bactopia update! Bactopia is now compatible with @nextflow.io v25 syntax and the plugin (github.com/bactopia/nf-...) is converted to the latest structure. I'm hoping to have a development build soon. If you're interested in testing please let me know here or at github.com/bactopia/bac...

The "data" package Secretary Kennedy used to bolster his argument for discontinuing #BARDA funding for #mRNA research doesn't support his argument. @jakescottmd.bsky.social lays it out in a must read for @statnews.com. www.statnews.com/2025/08/13/r...

Excited to share new #program, STEPS, which can simulate #dynamics of the E. coli Long-Term Evolution Experiment (#LTEE) or other microbes in serial transfer regime. telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2025/08/12/s... STEPS developed by @devinmlake.bsky.social, Zachary Matson, Minako Izutsu, and me.

Howdy! I'm currently writing up version 4 of Bactopia! Similar to previous major versions, I've started an issue on Github to track v4 progress. If you are a user of Bactopia and would like to help with feedback or with code, check out the following link: github.com/bactopia/bac...

To say that "the data show these vaccines fail" in regards to the mRNA plaform is unforgivable. For those of you that don't remember - this is the data from a SINGLE dose. In December 2020. So good I cried in grateful tears.

“Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week.” City engineer credits lower speed limits and smart design. I agree. #Helsinki #VisionZero

Carl Sagan explains how the ancient Greeks knew the Earth was round and calculated its circumference over 2,000 years ago.

The preprint of my first article is available on bioRxiv! We use a transposon ecology framework to analyze the distribution of insertion sequences within prokaryotic genomes. We characterize their ecological niche and show evidence of niche construction 🧪🧬💻 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

PO just confirmed that our 5th percentile R01 is not getting funded. Past NCI Payline at 4 percent. Cant believe it.

#microsky #plasmidsky #phagesky #phage

💥 Excited to introduce Bacformer 🦠 - the first foundation model for bacterial genomics. Bacformer represents genomes as sequences of ordered proteins, learning the “grammar” of how genes are arranged, interact and evolve. Preprint 📝: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n

Research for grants rather than grants for research. This kind of policy, especially with additional cuts to federal funding, will create perverse incentives that will have consequences on the actual science that this whole system is supposed to support. www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

Very excited to be co-organizing the next Keystone Symposia on Human Microbiomes, in Jan 2026 in Banff with Ami Bhatt and Harry Sokol. www.keystonesymposia.org/conferences/... Speaker list includes Emily Balskus, Don Ingber, Mohamed Abou Donia, Tamia Harris-Tryon, and Julie Segre.

Zip "prevents internalization and destruction of newly released phage progeny, a phenomenon that we call the anti-Kronos effect after the Greek god who consumed his offspring. Zip activity promotes the accumulation of free phages in bacterial lysogen communities, thereby enhancing viral spread."

Stunning! An 8-hour time-lapse to show the Earth is rotating while capturing the Milky Way.

M⃣I⃣S⃣S⃣I⃣N⃣G⃣ L⃣I⃣N⃣K⃣S⃣ 𝙉𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 paper by Sikora et al: metagenomic data from 1,313 ancient human remains over 37,000 years Identified >3,000 instances of known human pathogens Zoonotic pathogens begin to appear ~6,500 years ago coinciding with the rise of livestock domestication—major epidemiological shift

Mark the date: an incredible landmark as #solar power becomes EU's number one source of electricity in June 2025. Everything is impossible – until it's done. www.reuters.com/business/ene...

Measles virus kills ~100K people worldwide every year. Nearly all of these preventable deaths occur in young children in countries with poor access to vaccines. If you have the opportunity, protect your child, protect other children, protect immunocompromised folks...GET VACCINATED!!! 🙏

IDSA, along with AAP, APHA, ACP and others, has filed a lawsuit against HHS/Secretary Kennedy to stop unlawful changes to vaccine policy and defend public health. It is telling that learned societies uniformly oppose the vaccine policies of the HHS secretary. www.idsociety.org/news--public...

The full rotation of the Moon as recorded by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. -Credits: NASA

Sodium-iron batteries at grid scale: 200MW/400MWh, enough to "regulate up to 580 GWh annually." "The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid." 😍

Our paper demonstrating that within-species warfare interactions are ecologically important on human skin is now published in Nature Micro! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Beautiful paper on translation start sites and extented SD motifs in Staph. aureus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Congrats to colleagues in Strasburg univ.!