#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

Fantastic work. Functional characterisation of another viral auxiliary metabolic gene. Cyanophage interference in marine photosynthesis gets another angle.

Anybody tried any mScarlet3 antibodies on a western blot and got any recommendations? Cheers!

In a bookstore in Lisbon @dorianlynskey.bsky.social

Single-particle genomics uncovers abundant non-canonical marine viruses from nanolitre volumes Very cool paper and method. I was looking forward to this coming out of preprint (short thread below on why) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I knew it would take less than a day for a tiktok dj to make something.

PSA If your article/essay/blog post/LinkedIn post are sprinkled with emojis, bullet points (or the winning combo, emojis instead of bullet points) and those long dashes (—), I am not reading them. I know where ChatGPT is, I can ask it myself if I want to read a machine generated opinion on RNAseq

Come work with me! I am hiring a senior research technician to help me discover novel phage genes with antibiofilm properties. We will create metagenomic libraries, program robots, sequence viral metagenomes and many more fun things. The application deadline is 02-Dec-25. shorturl.at/GErUo

Check out our latest preprint in which we describe a new phage plaque sequencing pipeline which lowers the cost of sequencing by up to 10-fold while significantly shortening the time required to obtain the phage genome sequences www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Doing RNAseq analysis on Halloween

PhD opportunity in my lab: exploring how commensals and pathogens build biofilm communities on endotracheal (ventilator) tubes. Microbial ecology, medical microbiology and fancy imaging! Co-supervised with the fabulous Saskia Bakker and Jeremy Webb warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fa... #MicroSky

PhD project claxon!! Interested in phage functional metagenomics? Want to learn how to program a robot? Apply for a fully funded MIBTP PhD with myself, Rich Puxty, and @friendlymicrobe.bsky.social here at Warwick, working on viral anti-biofilm gene discovery. Apply here: tinyurl.com/phagegenomics

History. It repeats itself.

This map is really confusing

Weak and disappointing. If being a Nazi isn't enough to remove someone from the list of Fellows, what is?

Fascinating! Well done, so nice to see familiar names on this publication

Love my town.

Coming soon to the UK if Reform wins...

We have some full length 16S data from isolates that we'd like to match to ASV-level V4-V5 microbiomes from the same samples. It's pretty messy, especially for strains with multiple copies of 16S rRNA genes. Has anyone encountered this in their work, or in the lit? Any ideas how to approach this?