I have yet to find a phage genome extraction kit that produces a yield comparable to the good old phenol chloroform extraction. Latest comparison: extraction from 20ml of lysate each, 340ng/μl with phenol, 81ng/μl with a commercial kit, in the same elution volume.

Oooooooh excellent. An attendable Evergreen!!

This is crazy

New version of Inphared!!! With improved capabilities, such as defence and anti defence annotation in phage genomes, predicted lifestyle annotation, constantly expanding curated phage genome database and other improvements! Check out the preprint with all the numbers.

It is comforting to know that in this world of social uncertainties, rising fascism, perpetual war, and global economic instability, Gibson cloning still works.

Very glad to see this out. A huge effort by a lot of people. Well done everyone!! www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

It makes me so angry that we have to justify this technology to people with primary-school level reading skills at best. And those people somehow got to have their thumb on the kill switch of the research that enables this life-saving treatment.

A scientific misconduct on so many levels. Not the least by the journal which 1) doesn't ensure that the study that they published collected the data in a way that can be shared, and 2) refuses to publish the guidelines for reviewers to prevent this from happening again. Retract.

Wow wonderful work, many congratulations @emmajbanks.bsky.social !!! Looking forward to hearing more about this and your other work when you visit us at @warwicklifesci.bsky.social next month!!!

Find out about how different host-mimicking environments alter P. aeruginosa biofilm from @kadeayomikun.bsky.social at poster 169 at #Microbio26

Cracking talk from @nreddy.bsky.social about her PhD work - designing polymers based on AMPs to kill troublesome biofilm bacteria, or to help antibiotics kill these bacteria #Microbio26

Come to #Microbio26 poster 192 to hear how @charisthompson.bsky.social is sensitising mycobacteria to beta-lactams by making them flip their wall-building strategy #MicroSky

What a wonderful read. Definitely keeping this for future reference.

Wonderful opportunity with a great PI!! Highly recommended.

This does my head in. There is ZERO evidence that phoH in bacteriophages in general, and cyanophages in particular, has anything to do with P metabolism. The evidence for phoH role in bacterial P metabolism is not very strong either. There is no harm in being careful in your interpretations.

Judging by what I've heard from my colleagues, this movie should come with a trigger warning for this reason. "may upset scientists"

Why are the worst possible people making the most important decisions?

with proliferation of transposon knockout libraries for different bacterial species (like Keio collection), I'm afraid that the art of generating knockouts via transformation is slowly going to die away.

#MicroSky people, have you ever grown a Staph aureus biofilm that forms a crispy or hard exterior crust (not in urine)? My MBio student Izabela has, and we are not finding much literature on this.

This is a fantastic achievement for Reform and I wish them to get the second largest number of votes in every election they ever stand in

During her PhD, Jenny found something unexpected: biofilm-deficient P. aeruginosa mutants were just as tolerant to antibiotics as the WT when grown in our cystic fibrosis lung model. But why? #MicroSky 1/n

"Why do you care about US politics?" No reason. No reason at all.

On International Day of Women and Girls in Science 🔬👩‍🔬 We’re launching the Women Microbiologists Network: a member-led networking and discussions event for women in microbiology by Dr. Enas Newire. Read the news story and join: 🔗 https://microb.io/4ax5M5I

This is such a fascinating topic and brilliant work by @tosinorababa.bsky.social

Two questions which should be ask at the beginning of each project: 1. What's the question? 2. Which controls will you use?

Why should microbiologists be interested in historical infection remedies, and how can we best investigate them for antimicrobial discovery? Thoroughly enjoyed co-writing this Microbiology Primer with @tosinorababa.bsky.social www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... #MicroSky #Ancientbiotics

Curious, what's the best-practice tool at this point for taxonomically classifying long reads from metagenomes from less well-characterised environments? My impression is that Kraken will give lots of false positives and mis-classify taxa not in its database. Please share around for visibility.

This.

In case you missed it. For any microbial ecologists, we recently published our long-standing study on identifying the major genes/molecular markers for glycine betaine degradation in environmental bacteria www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Dear all, I am aware I have not been on the platform for a while but NanoSyrinx is hiring again so I thought I would share. If you are anyone you know is interested, take a look below: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43...

Been using Prokka for years now, excellent annotating software. Looking forward to try Bakta

Interesting phys.org/news/2025-12...

Have I agreed to review a grant over Xmas? Of course I have 🤦

Our pre-print on staff & students perspectives on EDI in Medicine is available now on Research Square www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7... We looked at what students feel confident in learning, what the curriculum currently represents, and how to support staff to enhance EDI topics further.

@simonecoppola.bsky.social has made micromorph, the first native Python application and library for measuring bacterial morphology. It runs interactively in napari or can be easily integrated into automated Python scripts. It integrates deep learning cell segmentation and is easily extended 🔬🦠🧫

I'm proud to share the latest methods work from my group. Led by @revathykri.bsky.social we wrote a book chapter on how we process and analyse viromes. Thanks to co-authors @rikhaagmans.bsky.social @ryancook94.bsky.social & Alise Ponsero link.springer.com/protocol/10....

This should cause some serious reconsideration about holding scientific meetings in the US If scientists can be harassed at the border and prevented entry just because of their private opinions, then conferences should be held in a more inclusive and democratic country www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Interesting - a broad host range marine cyanomyovirus link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Pathway analysis or KoalaKEGG for any non-model organism is really bad. Thousands of differentially expressed genes categorised into 5 pathways, most populated one being "unknown", is really quite poor.

This is fantastic.

We really have no use for these very late mea culpas in the Telegraph. How about putting all your weight behind fixing some of this disaster? Campaign for single market access? Freedom of movement for the young people at least? University home fees for the EU students?

This is giving me serious Mamdani vibes In an absolutely fantastic kind of way

Excellent group and fantastic topics!

Listening to a fascinating talk by @matthutchings.bsky.social on all things Streptomyces. Love it that all the references are author, year and PMID only, no journal names. 👏👏👏

2 days left to apply for a fully funded MIBTP Phd project with me at the School of Life Sciences @warwicklifesci.bsky.social at Warwick. We will do viral functional metagenomics and other cool techniques. Check out the details and apply in the link below warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fa...

I have a PhD position available on freshwater phage pollution, in terms of AMR impact and persistance of phage used in food and agriculture. #PhageSky #MicroSky www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Wonderful opportunity

Take notes UK. This is the exact playbook that Reform government will enforce if (when?) they get in power.

How did we get to a point where it is ok to be cruel? It seems to be a perfectly valid policy to try and make the immigrants life as miserable as possible, it seems to be acceptable to just be cruel to the trans people... Why is cruelty suddenly not just justified but revered?

I've made a short blog post summarising currently available substitutes to GeneFrames for bacterial timelapse microscopy. I will keep it updated with any future developments, so let me know if anything should be added. holdenlab.github.io/blog/2025/Ge... #microsky