Very happy to share our latest publication in Nat. Commun. www.nature.com/articles/s41... It was a great collaboration with @ifremer.bsky.social, @cbitoulouse.bsky.social and @pasteur.fr. We discovered a new hibernation factor in Archaea binding to the ribosome in three different conformations !

A new microfluidic device measures cell elasticity rapidly and reliably, offering potential improvements in disease diagnosis and prognosis by analyzing mechanical changes in cells. doi.org/hbzg4j

Second up tomorrow, April 22nd at 10AM EST / 4PM CET, Katy Weber will tell us about her interesting work to mechanistically characterize electron transfer in a reductase protein from Haloferax volcanii!! Visit the link in our bio for more info on how to join our community!!

Structural basis of transcription-coupled RNA damage by incorporation of oxidized ribonucleotides | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

🔈Paper out! We turned the most fascinating phage host-switch mechanism, diversity-generating retroelements, into a programmable mutagenesis tool, DGRec. You can perform targeted hypermutation of any 50-200bp sequence directly in vivo in E. coli www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Archaea hit prime time: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

We should all do our part to join Brian in ending genetics essentialism. I give a lecture at Pitt to the new PhD students entitled "There is no such thing as wild-type." I blogged about this years ago and it's part of my teaching statement. Long road, team effort✊🏻 micropopbio.org/blog/2018-07...

Integrative Omics and Network Biology Reveal Transcriptional Changes of Amino Acid Transport in Arabidopsis Susceptibility to Pseudomonas syringae https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.25.714176v1

#NatMicroPicks Same destination, different routes 🍄🧫🧪 Following 10,000 generations, parallel evolution occurred in separate yeast species, but took different genetic routes driven largely by transcriptomic and trans‑regulatory differences. #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New #AI model could cut the costs of developing protein drugs. #science #news www.lifescience.net/news/7008/ne...

Having a hard time keeping up with the fast-moving field of origin of eukaryotes/Asgards archaea? Our new perspective article can help, we review the status of research over the last decade and where it's going. The archaeal roots of eukaryotic life www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper from my 2nd PostDoc is now published in The ISME Journal by @isme-microbes.bsky.social! #Sulfur disproportionation occurs globally across anoxic habitats & has multiple mechanisms of independent evolutionary origin academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc... #Bacteria #Microbes #Evolution #DeepSea

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating). A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

CRISPR spacers reveal diverse and abundant Thermococcales viruses in hydrothermal vents www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...

Openness means more than access. That's why we encourage submissions of Replication Studies. Learn about publishing your replication study with us in our author guide: buff.ly/rcI0oAY

One of the biggest questions in biology is how complex cells evolved about 2 billion years ago. Here's my new story on how scientists are solving the mystery of eukaryotes like us. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qMbo22

Nice review by Urmila Chadayammuri of Maria Popova's new book Traversal. I have reviewed it for @science.org (coming soon) and my take has a lot of overlap with Urmila's. In short, it is a strange beast and all the better for that. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🧬 A major data reanalysis in December's most-read Genetics paper uncovers thousands of previously hidden protein-coding regions in human and mouse genomes: buff.ly/6TsX3ct

Archaeal G-quadruplexes: a novel model for understanding unusual DNA/RNA structures across the tree of life url: academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

A web-based atlas for exploring post-transcriptional regulation in the archaeon Sulfolobus acidocaldarius #microbiology #archaea #MicroSky #ArchaeaSky @asm.org journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

How the ocean’s hydrothermal systems made the first life on Earth possible

New preprint from my lab (with Arya Kaul, @fernpizza.bsky.social, and @brinda.eu), in which we explore new genes hitchhiking on the beneficial deletion that fused them together, and find them in the LTEE, M. Tb/bovis, and across the bacterial tree of life

Now published in Nature Biotechnology: go.nature.com/44P7nSm If you missed it, the TL;DR is in my April thread below

A cool genetic system to study site-pecific replication fork collapse and repair from the brilliant @winterhalterlab.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Out today in @cp-cell.bsky.social! We studied how environmental stresses like high-fat diets today can prime tumorigenesis months to years in the future (1/n)

FYI: New online! Detecting transcription factor binding sites with PADIT-seq

1. As we recently joined BlueSky, we want to repost this story for all newcomers! We sat down with @radler92.bsky.social to get more insight into the unique videos from his recent preprint on Promethearchaeota (formerly Asgard archaea). doi.org/10.1101/2025... (Videos and info below)

So you think your mammalian plasmids have nothing to fear from cloning and propagation in E.coli? Quantitative profiling of millions of nucleotides by Tom Copeman will prove you wrong! Supervised with the amazing @proftomellis.bsky.social and AZ, now on BioRxiv: doi.org/10.64898/202...

Are you a long-time fan of Archaea, an extremophile-phile, or are you simply curious? Either way, we have good news. We’re delighted to announce the 2026 EMBO Workshop on Archaea, 6–10 July. Sign up: meetings.embo.org/event/26-arc... We look forward to seeing you in Cambridge, UK. Please repost!