Of the 10 defense systems originally discovered in Doron et al 2018, Kiwa was one of the last to be studied - until now Kiwa is a membrane-embedded complex activated in phage attachments sites to degrade phage DNA A nice study by the Nobrega lab

Very interesting work from Ibarlosa and colleagues regarding functional amyloid forming proteins in prokaryotic immunity. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Check out our News & Views summary of the work as well! rdcu.be/eBHxh

Another important contribution from Sorek and Blokesch labs. This engineering strategy with synthetic inhibitors could yield more powerful phages than natural inhibitors, since the latter sometimes trigger other defense systems..

Looking for a new approach to studying or eliminating phages? Check out our study introducing anti-phage ASOs (antisense oligos) out in @Nature today. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Phage "satellites" that produce capsids but have no genes to produce tails have puzzled scientists for a long time. These are abundant as prophages in bacteria, but it was unclear how they can infect without tails Now, Penadés & co show that they hijack tails from other phages. Incredible!

Preprint: “Structural modeling reveals viral proteins that manipulate host immune signaling” Using AI-guided structural modeling, we find new families of viral proteins that sequester or cleave host immune signaling molecules Congrats Nitzan Tal! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📢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!

How phages trigger antiphage defence systems is a big unknown in the field. Looks great! #mevosky

Nuclease-NTPase systems use shared molecular features to controlbacterial anti-phage defense https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.10.664194v1

Hello everyone! I am pleased to share information on the first ever Computational Structural Virology Symposium, conducted August 4th on zoom and highlighting work in this emerging field. You can register for this event here: forms.gle/CNiqskMwQEuV.... Please re-post!

We're thrilled to share the published version of our DRT9 story, online today @nature.com! Congratulations to all authors! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cool work by Sanasar investigating how bacteria-phage dynamics affect the distribution of antiphage defense systems in the genome www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share that my work in the @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social lab describing chaperone-mediated phage sensing by a bacterial NLR-related protein is out in @plosbiology.org!

ICYMI: New online! Microorganisms thriving together as communities

Elegant prokaryote-style innate immunity revealed in Nature paper led by 🇱🇹 team Histidine+ADP-ribose = His-ADPR New bacterial “danger” molecule made during phage infection Produced by TIR domains, recognized by Macro domains, and blocked by viral evasion proteins www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧬🧫🦠 @science.org Bacterial reverse transcriptase synthesizes long poly-A–rich cDNA for antiphage defense | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #microbiology #bacteriophage #antiphage #immunity #DNA #RNAsky #RT #Cryo-EM #DRT9

Quite a nice paper in Cell Step 1: Filament Assembly Step 2: Bacterial Disassembly Bacterial CBASS phospholipases form filaments on sensing cyclic dinucleotides—triggering cell membrane rupture to abort phage infection Mirrors eukaryotic immune strategies of cell “self-sacrifice” like pyroptosis

#NatureMicroPicks Microbial integrons in focus 🦠🧬 Two studies showing microbial integrons encoding phage defense systems #MicroSky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

SoftAlign: End-to-end protein structures alignment https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.09.653096v1

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

News from the world of pAgos: We explored a distinct clade of short pAgos associated with HNH nuclease partners, which we named SPARHA, and discovered that they protect bacteria from phages and plasmids via abortive infection. Upon activation, SPARHA oligomerizes, forming filaments. A long 🧵

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...

🚨 🧬 Updated preprint on the completed BASEL collection - what's new? Some fun with bacterial immunity and a new P22 relative infecting E. coli K-12. A thread 🧵

Wow ! Cas13 likely evolved from the AbiF defense system. A great example of the long-term molecular diversification of defense proteins !

It is finally out! Muntathar Al-Shimary, @doudna-lab.bsky.social , @cresslab.bsky.social and I present a gene knockdown tool that works in diverse bacteriophages: CRISPRi through antisense RNA Targeting (CRISPRi-ART)! Check it out @naturemicrobiol.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My lab’s first preprint! We used functional metagenomics to identify phage defenses in human and soil microbiomes. We scaled these selections while maintaining accuracy, enabling us to examine 9 habitats for defense elements against 7 phages. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/10

Fantastic new paper out @nature.com! @merbllab.bsky.social discovers proteasome-derived peptides that function as a defence against bacterial infections. I'm not an immunologist but even I can tell that this finding has huge implications for new therapeutic interventions! 👉 go.nature.com/43k1a0H

Also see the associated News & Views by Tim Clausen for a quick summary: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Glad to share the work of @yli18smc.bsky.social and co on Lamassu, a bacterial defense system related to Rad50/Mre11 (RM). While RM carefully trims DNA ends for repair, Lamassu chops up the host chromosome. Our study reveals how it is regulated to minimize damage, activating only during infection.

1/ Transposable elements are often called "jumping genes" because they mobilize within genomes. 🧬 But did you know they can also jump 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 cells? 🤯 Our new study reveals how retrotransposons invade the germline directly from somatic cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A short thread 🧵👇

Join our favorite microbiology meeting! Fantastic talks, poster sessions, new technologies, and all the hot areas of microbiology in a great environment - experts in cell & systems biology, microbiomes, environment & evolution, pathogenesis, phage & antibiotics DON’T MISS abstract deadline, April 1

Preprint alert! ✨ In this project that I co-led with @benadler.bsky.social, we show that a miniature CRISPR-Cas10-like enzyme, mCpol, uses a novel inverse signaling mechanism to prevent the spread of viruses that attempt immune evasion by depleting host cyclic nucleotides. Check it out:

Chemically Synthesized Ultra-long DNA as Building Blocks to Accelerate Complex Gene Construction in Synthetic Biology https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.02.646740v1

SPARHA represents a two-component defense system based on a suicidal cellular response, in which activation of the HNH effector by the pAgo sensor leads to filament formation, promoting efficient degradation of invading nucleic acids.

BFVD has been updated to version 2! Rachel improved the accuracy of viral structure predictions by running 12 recycles of ColabFold (AlphaFold2). In the latest database, over 60% of the predicted structures are now high quality. Also, we provide the PAE JSON files for each predictions.

🏆️ Dr. Maria Sokolova @arimiora.bsky.social, #Biochemie, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry Alle Informationen zum Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis #HML2025 🏅👏 der #DFG und zu den Preisträger*innen: 👇 6/6 www.dfg.de/de/service/p...

"Even NIH officers don’t know what will happen next." In our latest @science.org Working Life essay, an assistant professor expresses frustration with stalls at NIH and asks: "Will my grants ever be reviewed?" @vjrp.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

Fascinating paper about the potential of phage for local drug delivery by Brian Hsu (Va Tech) and colleagues. (also nice acknowledgment for SeqCoast Genomics @seqcoast.bsky.social!) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New online! Self-sacrificing cell death to thwart phage infection

Our paper is finally published in Science! 🎉The HPLC, NMR, MS, purification, and characterization of the new molecule felt like a real detective story. I was especially thrilled to use and reference my grandfather, Lev Osterman's, 1966 paper—he was the main reason I became a scientist.

Another key module of human immune system exist in bacterial immunity: welcome CARD domains to the ancestral immune modules family !!! Beautiful work from Tana Wein now leading her lab at the Weizmann Institute and @soreklab.bsky.social.

OUT NOW: Longitudinal phage–bacteria dynamics in the early life gut microbiome www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper out @CellCellPress: Structure guided discovery of viral proteins that inhibit host immunity Congrats Erez Yirmiya, Azita Leavitt, Gil Amitai, our collaborators at the Kranzusch lab, and coauthors A 🧵 1/10 www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Top 4 misconceptions about science 1. It fills knowledge-gaps (discoveries are unknown unknowns) 2. It proceeds along a straightforward path (discoveries are not predictable) 3. It looks for answers (new questions are crucial) 4. It is only rational (requires night science leaps)

Finally moved to #Bluesky and happy to share our recent work about a new phage anti-defense system, based on NAD reconstitution by new enzymatic reactions. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A nice article in The Scientist explains Jens Hör's discovery of bacteria that conjugate ubiquitin-like proteins to interfere with virus assembly www.the-scientist.com/bacteria-dis...

(G)reat paper @raw937.bsky.social !

50 years after its discovery, the role of the T7 kinase is finally revealed - shielding the phage against a wide variety of bacterial immune systems. Very interesting work from the Savitski & Typas labs

An incredible preprint from the Bernheim lab applies deep learning to explore microbial defense systems. New defense systems specific to Actinibacteria are described, plus an insane number of protein families predicted to function in bacterial immunity. Wow!!