➡️ preprint from the lab! Bacteria have loads of antiviral defences in their mobile genetic elements (MGEs). So when MGEs move between bacteria, the defences move with them, generating a fast turnover of defences in bacteria. But what about the antiviral defence turnover in the MGEs themselves? 🤔 🧵👇

Congratulations to Sonomi Yamaguchi for her paper at @nature.com. Sonomi discovered Clover defense and explained how nucleotide signals control each step of viral sensing, immune regulation, and viral restriction – named for her beautiful "four-leaf" structures 🍀 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Aude Bernheim @audeber.bsky.social and Eugene Koonin discuss one of most interesting questions in the field connecting bacterial and animal immunity! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🦠🧫 Envie d'en savoir plus sur la Microbiologie et de découvrir l'Institut Pasteur ? Rejoignez nous pour conférence scientifique grand public, accompagnée d’une performance artistique le 27 janvier à 18h! Inscrivez-vous :) research.pasteur.fr/fr/event/con...

Advancing Fast-Track Genome Engineering in Bacillus subtilis Phages ACS Synthetic Biology pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Bacterial genomes encode a rich repertoire of antiphage systems, but we still know surprisingly little about when these systems are actually expressed. In this preprint, Lucas Paoli et al, ask what shapes antiphage systems expression in native contexts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧬🛡️How are new immune mechanisms created? We show how Lamassu antiphage system, originated from a DNA-repair complex and evolved into a compact and modular immune machine, wt Dinshaw Patel lab in @pnas.org. 👏 @matthieu-haudiquet.bsky.social, Arpita Chakravarti & all authors! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

We built GenoPHI: a machine learning workflow that predicts phage-host interactions at strain level. This could help rapidly select phages to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections or for microbiome engineering without exhaustive lab testing. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

JOB OFFER #PhageSky We have a postdoc position opening in my group to investigate phage-MGE interactions ! We're based in the very nice city of Lyon, France @mmsb-lyon.bsky.social Contact me for more info ! >> Apply on the CNRS webpage emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

Excited to finally share this work! We noticed a pair of genes - a nuclease and a protease - shuffles between antiviral systems. We show how proteolysis activates the nuclease, triggering defense in known and unknown immune contexts. tinyurl.com/2uwwy4ty

Excited to share the work that’s been on my mind for the past 2 years, now on bioRxiv! Led with Matt Walker, and my first project in the Sternberg Lab . Check it out ⬇️ tinyurl.com/mshwjd77

First preprint from the Nemudryi Lab! 🍾 In this work, we link antiviral immunity in bacteria and humans by showing that homologs of human Schlafen nucleases protect bacteria from phages. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧬 From bacteria to humans: a new study led by @institutcurie.bsky.social, @institutpasteur.bsky.social & @inserm.fr reveals SIRal, a novel human immune protein with ancestral roots. A new path for immunotherapy? 🔗 Read: www.pasteur.fr/en/press-are...

🦠🧍‍♀️From bacterial to human immunity. We report in @science.org the discovery of a human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins that participates in the TLR pathway of animal innate immunity. Co-led wt @enzopoirier.bsky.social by D. Bonhomme and @hugovaysset.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📢Preprint out! Excited to share my final work from the @soreklab.bsky.social! We mined phage dark matter using structural features shared by anti-defense proteins (viral tools that help phages bypass bacterial immunity) to guide discovery. Found 3 new families targeting immune signaling!

Le Palais de la Découverte est menacé! Il a contribué à éveiller ma passion pour la science quand j'étais petit. Nous devons tout faire pour protéger ce lieu unique qui a toute sa place au cœur de Paris. Signez la pétition ici: chng.it/BnR9gZvhL2

The Viral AlphaFold Database of monomers and homodimers reveals conserved protein folds in viruses of bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.14.653371v1

White smoke, we have a new pope and also 16 new anti-phages systems in sedentary integrons (SCIs) ! In collaboration with the Rocha lab, we show in our new paper that cassettes of these large platforms encode many known anti-phage defenses, and uncovered 16 new ones. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Out in Nature today: A new immune signaling molecule, His-ADPR, is produced by defensive TIR domain proteins in bacteria to protect from phage Joint work with the Tamulaitienė and Kranzusch labs www.nature.com/articles/s41... Congrats Carmel Avraham, Dziugas Sabonis, Renee Chang and co-authors!

It was an honor for my lab and myself to host the meeting on the Immune Systems of Bacteria. Such a high from all the incredible science and sharing with scientists from the whole world the greatness of Paris in the spring. Vive la science, et vive Paris!

Structural basis for Lamassu-based antiviral immunity and its evolution from DNA repair machinery https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.02.646746v1

CBASS, CRISPR, and mCpol- oh my! What a satisfying collaboration with @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social 's lab- we uncovered a new cyclic dinucleotide signaling pathway, but it doesn't work how you'd expect! Check out the thread from @aesully98.bsky.social for an overview of the most important findings!

New online! Genetics, ecology and evolution of phage satellites

Hello BlueSky! Inaugural post here from the Sternberg Lab. We're excited to share our latest work, in which we teamed up with the @WiedenheftLab to study how DRT9 reverse transcriptases provide antiviral immunity. Here’s what we found: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New version of DefenseFinder available defensefinder.mdmlab.fr (& cli) Now encompassing 263 systems (+111 this year..!). Thanks @ftesson.bsky.social, DefenseFinder grandmaster. Full list of systems here: defense-finder-models/List_system_article.md at master · mdmparis/defense-finder-models

Happy to share our latest piece of work on the PARIS bacterial immune system. We performed a detailed characterization of the AriB Toprim nuclease, the effector of PARIS immunity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Huge thanks to my sister for helping put these together.

I'm thrilled to announce our latest work is now published in Cell! Viruses encode numerous proteins that inhibit host defenses, but identifying immune-modulatory proteins among millions of viral sequences has been nearly impossible - until now! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Phage defence system abundances vary across environments and increase with viral density www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #jcampubs

The Institut Pasteur has decided to leave X (formerly Twitter) to join BlueSky! 🦋 The Institut Pasteur made this decision due to several serious issues observed on the X platform since its acquisition. Join us here to continue advocating for science. www.pasteur.fr/en/home/pres...

👋 Hi antiphage defense community, we are soon releasing an update of DefenseFinder. We are doing our best to include all the great discoveries from the community, but with so much going on we might miss things. Please answer wt preprints/papers with new systems or mail/git them to us. 🙏

Excited to share our work using machine learning to predict anti-phage defense systems! 1/n

What is the diversity of antiphage systems out there ? We used protein and genomic language models (and defense score!) to start bringing some answers: >45 000 protein families. Leb by E. Mordret. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Interactive UMAP to have fun mdmparis.github.io/antiphage-la...

Out in NAR, AntiDefenseFinder & our "systematic" analysis of inhibitors of antiphage systems wt Bondy-Denomy lab led by @ftesson.bsky.social and E. Huiting. Not so "systematic" as very few known, fun stuff on MGE, antidefense islands and cool phages exaptations! academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

Happy to see our paper out @ Nat Comm We discovered a bacterial NLR-like pattern recognition receptor that can sense 3 different viral proteins as a signature for infection. This explains its broad defense against different phage families Congrats Nathalie Béchon! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another day, another cool recent preprint on bacterial immunity. #Phagesky This one is on an super cool regulation of Restriction-Modification systems. Post-translational modifications that are temperature dependent AND inherited over 60 generations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Out in Nature Microbiology, we predicted phage-bacteria interactions in E. coli species using only genomic information. Adsorption, not defense systems, is the main driver at this scale (relevant for a phage therapy context), leading to tailored cocktails! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇

💻🧫 New preprint: How accurately can we predict diverse phage bacteria-interactions from their genomes only ? We created a matrix of >38k phage-bacteria interactions to find out (=> AUROC 86%) & used our predictions to recommend tailored phage cocktails. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...