The (very real) cost of changing your research field. Absolutely true! But the freedom to pivot is one of the greatest things in this profession. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great opportunity to participate in scientific outreach!

Had a fantastic time with @markowenmartin.bsky.social’s on his #MattersMicrobial podcast (@microbetv.bsky.social). We discussed how to uncover the killing mechanisms of hundreds of antibacterials simultaneously and how #AI can transform the search for new antibiotics 🧪🦠💊 youtu.be/Wa0zd-TRCO8?...

Yo, micro/evo/qbio/physics of living systems/astrobiology/renegade cell bio folks- if you are interested in starting a feed, reply/repost this. Let's get the crew back together!

Fascinating shift in the geography of drug development (excellent writing too!)

Interested in Antimicrobial Resistance & Quantitative Bio? Join a 3-day meeting+workshop with some of my favorite #AMR #QBio scientists this April (University of Exeter, UK). Register here: tinyurl.com/QAMR2025reg 🧪🦠

Beautiful detective work disentangling what is the actual trigger for cell death upon transcriptional arrest 🧪

Never-have-I-ever seen technology racing forward as fast as #LMMs in the past two years. Watching the #openAI releases coming out in real-time in their twelves-days series is jaw dropping! 🤖🌊 www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

The ability of LMMs (chatGPT here) to *assist* in generating useful code for biologists a mind-blowing power multiplier 🤯! My advice to biologists at all career stages: Learn to code, its a superpower 🦸‍♀️🦹‍♂️ (simple example, counting fluorescent colonies isolated from mouse gut microbiome) 🧪🦠

Our second paper on the bacterial toxin colibactin is now out on mBio, this time we critically evaluated the claim that colibactin toxicity necessitates cell-cell contact 🧪🦠🧵(1/9) journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Fantastic resource. Thanks for putting this together Georgia!

Very sobering (yet great) thread on the changing landscape of sci publishing. IMO, not all is lost, the arc of justice bends long, but eventually in the right direction - some publishers/journals will tarnish their reputation beyond repair (just like mdpi did)

Sorry for flooding your feed! I (automatically) migrated my X posts this weekend and those were showed as new posts here, including some very out-of-date irrelevant posts 🤦

Can’t believe we unlocked this level of the #AI hype - huge adds for @AnthropicAI in airports (Boston & Atlanta). Wonder what % of ppl even know what’s the product (<0.1% probably)

We found that the bacterial #toxin colibactin acts as a double-edged sword and inflicts self-damage (evident in hundreds of genomes). Our recent collaboration with @DaganLab is now out on @genomeresearch https://genome.cshlp.org/content/34/8/1154.full

Immensely proud of the latest graduate from our lab @emily_lowry23⁩ 🎊🎉🥳⁦. Dr Lowry’s second paper will be published *very* soon … (and hopefully her third paper shortly after that 🤞)

Very interesting @biorxiv_micrbio paper: @AnaRitaBrochad1 systematically mapped the interplay between extracellular chemical cues (~100), master regulators and downstream transport system in E. coli. Elegant and...

What makes #phd s so hard & depressing (yet also so rewarding), a thread started by @ThePhDPlace made me reflect about my own experience and my students’ journeys. Hoping this self-reflection thread will be useful for students (and PIs too!) 1/9

Results are in, mostly saying free (academic) labor is reasonable (seriously?🤦‍♂️). Going forward, I'll review 2 of every 3 such grants I'm asked about 🫡

Need your take! Should scientists serve as *unpaid* reviewers on granting mechanisms that they are not eligible for (e.g, US scientists reviewing for a closed dutch grant system)?

Signing off a very exciting week at the co-chair of the @GordonConf on Drug Resistance. Hard, yet totally worth it! Lots to share with chairs-to-be (thread on Monday)

First time I'm attending a conf with 2/3 of my lab (@GordonConf / drug resistance). Strongly recommend PIs to do that, costly, *but* a really great bonding experience.

A @bioRxiv 💎 (by Waldor lab): Inducible transposon mutagenesis circumvents the infection bottle-neck that *severely* limit functional genomic screens of bacteria within hosts (possibly a game changer for many labs): https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.21.595064v1

Deadline for @GordonConf on Drug Resistance is fast approaching (5/26). Apply by 5/21 for posters and talks. We’ll greatly appreciate help spreading the word 🙏🏼 https://www.grc.org/drug-resistance-conference/2024/

Congrats @asanchez_lab for really elegant work! Assembling *all* possible permutations of N microbes (with a multi-pipette) and evaluate their performance (they explore N=8, P. aeruginosa). https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.03.592148v1

Just covered this paper in our journal club. Beautiful work by Erdal Topeka’s lab (@UTSWNews) on bacterial adaptation to antibiotics in mice GI tract (without evolving resistance) https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128%2824%2900016-7

Why are some non-antibiotic drugs toxic to bacteria 💊☠️🦠? Do they work like standard #antibiotics (ABX)? Our latest work by @MarianaNoto published @ScienceMagazine addresses this fundamental question (1/n) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk7368

(potentially) an unpopular opinion, scientific publishers need to *embrace* #LLMs (e.g., @ChatGPTapp) rather than try to curb their wide adoption. One area already ripe for an LLM revolution is scientific literature reviews.

Hard to admit, but being a PI is not everything I hoped it would be … I’m sure this might resonate with other PIs out there

I keep on preaching to my lab about the usefulness @ChatGPTapp for coding, but real-life demos might be more effective. A thread on a neural network we quickly developed to classify antibiotics sensitivity 🧵 (1/10)

Systems and synthetic biologists, we are recruiting at the department of Systems Biology at the @UMassChan. Position is open to faculty at all levels. http://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/25423

The mundane beauty of the simplest experiments always gets me (bacteria enjoying nutrient-rich medium). Credit to Carmen Li from our lab. #MundaneLabBeauty

Even more remarkable than #ChatGPT, is the bustling ecology of *paid* services already thrive on top of it. Did you know there are market places for buying/selling #AI prompts …

That was a tough one. There were ~2,500 colonies, most humans and machines considerably underestimated. Follow the thread for details and anecdotes ... 🧵

Biologists, #AI is out for your jobs. Fantastic talk by Jim Collins on drug discovery opens @HarvardMSI’s #MSIsymposium. Related anecdote, I realized I used #chatGPT every day this week for work

So you (still) consider yourself a (micro)biologist. Another #FridayLabChallenge In 10sec, eyeball the colony number 🧵

Following my #FridayLabChallange by analyzing your tweet replies 🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏽🙋🏿‍♂️. Results first (I’ll tweet later and explain how I scraped the results. Hint, #chatGTP was my co-pilot)

So you call yourself a microbiologist … quick Friday challenge (with surprising results). In 10sec, eyeball the colony number 🧵🧵🧵

Useful data for those working with the confetti strains that @ATinyGreenCell cloned and shared with us and many other (collected by @MarianaNoto) 🧵.

Just attended a session for future @GordonConf chairs and realized the remarkable scale of this enterprise: ~400 meetings/seminars per year. 400!! Will do my best to contribute with co-chair @Alexisns to this endeavor!

Enjoying the seminar live-streamed from Qatar

Interesting analysis of ⁦@NIH⁩ funding data. Falling just below funding threshold predicts better publishing success than just above the threshold (perseverance pays off) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12189-3

My Systems Biology home department at @UMassChan is recruiting for a tenure track position. We’re fascinated by diverse questions in SysBio, SynBio, Evolution, and Quantitative Biology. DM if you have questions. Please #RT https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo?action=joblist&id=22151

One of the best invitations I got for a predatory conference (yet). Don’t really know what to read into these double quotes. Maybe is because I am an “expert” on renewable energy

3 years ago my lab had its first taste of #NGS. Since then our hunger for sequencing doubled every 6 months. As a postdoc I swore by quantitative microscopy … as a PI I feel that my journey towards the dark side is now complete ⚫️

A remarkable thing about @biorxivpreprint is tracing the paper’s version history. This paper on chemotherapy (5-FU) metabolism by the #microbiome (@PTurnbaugh lab) is a beautiful example of how scientific discovery evolves. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/820084v3

Elegant and potentially very useful for studying protein-DNA interactions (bacteria). Every time #biochemistry can be circumvented with #genetics I sigh with relief 😅. Is it just me? https://rdcu.be/cOPXM

We can finally blame someone else for our poor diet choices: Microbiome influences diet selection of the host (mice), demonstrated very elegantly by @BrianTrevelline and @KevinDKohl https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2117537119

Our paper on syntrophic microbial communities is out on @CellSystemsCP. Congrats to @MarianaNoto @BrittanyRosener and @serkansayin_. A quick recap of our findings on this🧵 https://www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext/S2405-4712(21)00290-8

Our paper on cell-cell variation in drug resistance in isogenic melanoma cells is out. Congrats to @PayamKhoshkenar and @emily_lowry23. A quick recap of our findings 🧵🧵🧵 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-94941-8