The Long-Term Evolution Experiment has returned home. Led by Professors Richard Lenski (@relenski.bsky.social) and Jeffrey Barrick, this groundbreaking work continues to reveal how bacteria evolve in real time. 12 flasks. 1 legacy. 🔗https://tinyurl.com/f6vjyjvr

We don’t talk enough about how Operation Warp Speed saved many lives in spite of Trump, nor how many people died because of his failure of leadership. Great piece from my great colleague @maciekboni.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/maciekbo...

See below for less subtlety. More folks will have to ask groups like @scholars.org that uncritically amplify the arguments of In Covid's Wake precisely what they are doing. Is it that they didn't read what the authors wrote, actually agree, or are just 'getting along'? bsky.app/profile/josh...

An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Every cubic meter of air contains anywhere from 10 to 10 million microbes, depending on the altitude, location, season and time of day. At an observatory Watop Puy de Dôme, a 4,800-foot inactive volcano in France, microbiologists sample the aeromicrobiome.

How do GWAS and rare variant burden tests rank gene signals? In new work @nature.com with @hakha.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and our wonderful coauthors we find that the key factors are what we call Specificity, Length, and Luck! 🧬🧪🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

LFG! 🤓🧬🔭🧪

For some (like 👉 this guy 👈) this is Drop Everything Important. www.target.com/p/lego-ideas...

If you're looking for a faculty position at the intersection of ecology and computing (both broadly defined), please apply to this joint search between the CEE Department and the College of Computing at MIT: cee.mit.edu/people/share...

Love the idea of the "deletion test" posed by @needhibhalla.bsky.social & coauthors in their commentary about costs of cutting DEI efforts in science. What if that student were "deleted?" What will the costs be? Screenshots attached to enhance access. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Microbial eukaryote folks, you've got two more weeks to apply for this TT job: apply.interfolio.com/174456. We're a supportive department with a great breadth of interests, with really sharp students, in a very livable city with the nation's best park system. Come join us!

Getting vaccinated is much safer than getting Covid

I got to know Pittsburgh by canvassing every weekend for Kamala Harris, and I will knock on every damn door in Pittsburgh for @conorlambpa.bsky.social if he primaries John Fetterman.

David Roberts said Yamamoto has successfully powered down and will be in hibernation mode and living in his closet like the robot from Small Wonder until pitchers and catchers next year when they will update his firmware

We're just 6 months away from @keystoneSymposia.bsky.social Beyond #Antibiotics : Emerging Strategies Combating #BacterialInfection, May 2026 in Breckenridge! 👉Scholarship and short talk abstract deadlines are Jan 7! 🧐 keysym.us/KSBeyondAntibiotics26 #KSBeyondAntibiotics26

1/ It is my pleasure to share the latest preprint of the team: "Symbiotic diversification relies on an ancestral gene network in plants" doi.org/10.1101/2025... Here, we identified and functionally validated a novel master regulator of intracellular symbioses! A thread ... #PlantScience

Australia has so much clean energy they're literally giving it away. Meanwhile, GOP is in all-out war to stamp out solar www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

A 💎 quote from Rustom in yesterday's seminar: "The problem is that grants last at most 5 years, but humoral immunity lasts longer than that, so how do you study how it wanes?" (turns out that continuously monitored zoo animals help)

The center of my Venn diagram of interests👇🏻 except for my team fandom ☘️

1/5: Interested in basketball? Disease ecology? Epidemics? 5 years ago, the NBA embarked on a great experiment in infection control: "The NBA Bubble." In a new preprint led by Dr. Yun Tao + Dr. Nita Bharti, we examine it's underlying disease ecology principles. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Read more in @maxroser.bsky.social’s article “Our history is a battle against the microbes: we lost terribly before science, public health, and vaccines allowed us to protect ourselves”: ourworldindata.org/microbes-bat...

Humanity’s history is a continuous battle between us and the microbes. For most of our history, we were on the losing side. It wasn’t even close. We were losing very decisively.

Today on Club EvMed we enjoyed a super discussion with the authors of this important paper. Join us next time or enjoy the recording! "Waning immunity drives respiratory virus evolution and reinfection" by Antia, Koelle & Bull Club EvMed: sites.duke.edu/clubevmed/ academic.oup.com/emph/article...

We are really proud of this report from our 3 colloquia convened by the AAM and supported by the Moore Foundation. A few experts even said they would use it as their introductory textbook for this area. Please check it out!

We are really proud of this report from our 3 colloquia convened by the AAM and supported by the Moore Foundation. A few experts even said they would use it as their introductory textbook for this area. Please check it out!

How did life begin, and why does it matter? Scientists are tracing early microbial life–from LUCA to multicellularity–to unlock insights for biotech, climate science and even space exploration. Read the article: asm.org/articles/202...

Terrific thread w/ >2 great stories about labor movements that galvanize communities. Even if you know the stories well (where 'redneck' comes from, 'bread and roses') it's still thought provoking, e.g. how do we strengthen science coalitions?

🧵Remember the preprint claiming SARS-CoV-2 has a "synthetic fingerprint"? It said a restriction map was "extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution.” I took its claims seriously. The "synthetic fingerprint" hypothesis collapses. My new preprint explains why. arxiv.org/abs/2510.23833

What happens to our immune system with aging, reducing vaccine response? Our memory T cells undergo a dramatic shift resulting in dysregulated B cell antibody production @alleninstitute.org @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Morning!

Happy Sinkhole Bus day to yinz who celebrate!

We get amazing combination a lot. I actually think much of it goes back to a deep misunderstanding: people believe you must have mechanism to show causality. And you don't. And there is no forum in which you can just-in-time train them on this foundational concept.

We selected the laziest mouse at each round to inoculate the next batch of germfree mice: over rounds of selection and passaging, behavior shifted without changes to the mouse genome: rdcu.be/eM3rO 🦠🧫

Delighted that Pitt and the Jonas Salk team were recognized for its development of the polio vaccine with a @asm.org Milestones in Microbiology site! It was my true honor to present this award last Friday on World Polio Day. Onwards towards eradication! asm.org/press-releas...

So I guess we're doing mammatus today

Genome assembly fresh of the supercomputer, total size = 29,892,519,935 base pairs 🦎🧬

I was delighted to speak with WTAE anchor Shannon Perrine about how the “inclusion” of students put our EvolvingSTEM program at risk, among many others. We continue to “engage” >2500 students annually throughout Western PA and with various partners in 10 states.

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2/6 Note that this is taken out of a much longer discussion. We we discussed the "DEI" I talked about the problems of targeting all sorts of grants including those involving various groups including transgender people. The section that included only includes my comment about the term "women".

Here is the video of the segment with me and @vscooper.micropopbio.org on WTAE (ABC) in Pittsburgh from last night Six Parts 1/6

I wrote a new tutorial on competitive metagenomic read recruitment (and profiling of the results with #anvio), for those of us nerds who would like to get their hands dirty with data: anvio.org/tutorials/co...

PMI faculty Drs. Paul Duprex and @vscooper.micropopbio.org spoke at a ceremony honoring the University of Pittsburgh’s legacy in the development of the polio vaccine.

@vscooper.micropopbio.org was very effective talking about outreach programs including how they had to renegotiate aims around "DEI" but they still made the program inclusive. 2/3

Story about delayed funding from NIH aired on a local news stations this evening with me and @vscooper.micropopbio.org We filmed this a couple of month ago when I was not clear if the missing funding would materialize. (Thanks for hardworking NIH staff, it did). 1/3

Cool finding: "When comparing to other firmicutes, S. aureus chromosome organization and replication cycle resembles that of slow-growing B. subtilis, where newborn cells typically start with one hemi-replicated chromosome and origins positioned at opposite poles," www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Come join us in Knoxville! The Dept. of Microbiology 🧫🦠 at the University of Tennessee is hiring 2 Assistant Professors (tenure track, 9-month appt.). Microbial Drivers of Chronic Disease: apply.interfolio.com/173153Quantitative Microbe-Plant-Environment Interactions: apply.interfolio.com/173345

This looks to be a great meeting convened by @microbiologysociety.org microbiologysociety.org/event/societ...