Paper alert! We have created a bacterium that eats plastic! We named it PETBuster! Great work by PhD student Dekel Freund @dekel-freund.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 News on bioremediation! A study published in Nature reveals how by genetically modifying the bacterium Vibrio natriegens, it simultaneously degrades five toxic contaminants in industrial wastewater and saline soils. Read the full article: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🔊New perspective piece out @genomebiolevol.bsky.social. "The Genomic Kaleidoscope: On the Hidden Dimensions of Within-Species Genomic Diversity" 💡🌀🌈 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... Co-led with @mbrasovives.bsky.social and @diegoharta.bsky.social Check out our thread! 🧵👇 (1/n)

Design stable, folded proteins using only the 10 "ancient" amino acids. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🫵 Our daily bread: Experimental evolution of gene essentiality in bacteria! | mBio journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @mbio.bsky.social

A wonderful collaboration between my lab and Andy Ellington and Edward Marcotte here at UT. We obtained lots of thermal stable plastic degrading enzymes from the deep sea (Guaymas Basin, Gulf of California)

Looking forward to seeing David Moi's talk about Foldtree and the upcoming Foldtree II at #APSPM2026 in sunny Brisbane. biosig.lab.uq.edu.au/strphy26/spe... @official-smbe.bsky.social

Beautiful work from my friend @kiranrpatil.bsky.social . Gut bacteria can accumulate Forever chemicals and help us get rid of them! Happy we could contribute! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Molecular fossils may not always be what they seem. “Just as archaeologists know to be careful in how they interpret physical fossils, historians of protein evolution could take similar care in their interpretation of molecular fossils.” - @lynnkamerlin.bsky.social in this co-authored article⤵️

New Paper Alert! “The diversity of PET-degrading enzymes: A review”. We present a database of PET-plastic hydrolases, including sequence, structure, and function. From this, we discuss the distribution, efficiency, stability, and potential for biodegradation of PETases.

The future of bioremediation? Not seeding sites with super-degrader bacteria, but super-fortifying microbiomes of target locations with catabolic genes via HGT. Nature has been doing it forever 💪🏻! Eng community-level function is the way! enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Do people in the same household share strains when they have the same species? How many cells transmit when a strain is shared? Can strain composition be dynamic when species composition is stable? We answer these and related questions for the facial skin microbiome in our latest paper. 🧵[1/10]

Bite-sized solutions A recent study found high amounts of microplastics in the human brain. This could spur funding and technological advances for plastic degradation go.nature.com/3QL4L0b

Fun to see it out in print! I was really lucky to have an amazing team to work with on this. If this sort of work seems interesting to you or someone you know, please feel free to reach out (planning to staff a lab later this year). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Guess what? You got it, another @plosbiology.org focus issue of thought-provoking Perspectives and Essays on an issue relevant to this Keystone Symposium What can I say? We clearly care a lot about many of the topics at these joint meetings Take a look and let us know what you think! 👀⬇️ 🧪

Dear #Streptomyces community, Jana (@janitensen.bsky.social) and I want to test the evolvability/plasticity of Streptomyces metabolic networks. We plan to use #auxotrophic strains for this. If you have some and are willing to share, please get in touch with us! Thank you!

The ability of pentose pathways to form all essential metabolites provides clues to the origins of metabolism journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... #jcampubs

Loving this platform.