Mauricio Contreras
@mpcontreras.bsky.social
📤 878
📥 275
📝 36
Junior Group Leader at
@zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social
NLR and effector biology 🇦🇷
reposted by
Mauricio Contreras
Gulnara Tagirdzhanova
4 days ago
Still cannot fully believe it, but today is officially my first day as a PI at
@scilifelab.se
and Stockholm University! The lab is open, time to fill it with science..
#newPI
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Aude Bernheim
3 days ago
How diverse is bacterial immunity ? We report in
@science.org
how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems. 👏
@emordret.bsky.social
,
@alexhv.bsky.social
& al
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Explore them here
defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...
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https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv8275
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Xander Zuijdgeest
3 days ago
Norwich looks strangely familiar 🤔 Had a great visit to
@thesainsburylab.bsky.social
this week! Thank you for the invite
@kamounlab.bsky.social
, and thanks to everyone for the warm welcome and great discussions about science!
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The Sainsbury Laboratory
4 days ago
Our 11th (!) Preprint Pizza Party was a success! 📑 Students, postdocs and RAs from our lab and
@johninnescentre.bsky.social
discussed recent
@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social
papers and enjoyed a pizza break 🍕 Stay tuned for the publication of our comments online!
#PreprintCommentClub
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Mauricio Contreras
Şuayb Üstün
4 days ago
When you cannot decide between two titles...excited for our
#preprint
🥳
#teaser
add a skeleton here at some point
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Mauricio Contreras
Sabine Brumm
4 days ago
🧵1/X 🚨New Preprint🚨 Root pathogens are hard to manage, and we know little about plant genes enabling infection (susceptibility genes). Here, we show that SCARs are susceptibility factors in barley roots - and their loss affects pathogens/symbionts in distinct ways
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.31.715550v1
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Thorsten Langner
4 days ago
Now that it's official i've got some news! Our group has moved from
@mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social
to
@unihalle.bsky.social
where I am now leading the department for phytopathology and plant protection 🍄🌾🧬
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Sophien Kamoun
4 days ago
I just published:
#CelebratingAlumni
: The Lab Is a Launchpad, Not the Destination These last weeks brought several alumni into sharp focus, and I couldn't resist writing it down. A celebration. With links.
medium.com/p/celebratin...
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Mauricio Contreras
CRAG
9 days ago
🌱 CRAG launches an international call for early‑career researchers! We invite young scientists interested in starting their independent research group at CRAG 📅 Deadline - April 26 Apply now 👉
https://f.mtr.cool/jdwzombrbd
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GetGenome
10 days ago
Got Genome?
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Isabel saur
3 months ago
Wei Shi
@wshisky.bsky.social
& Merle‘s work is online. Wei really pushed this work from scratch and Merle linked it to MLA diversification…3rd (co-)first author paper in her PhD. Very proud PI! And only possible through collaboration with G. Döhlemann,
@grandpahiro.bsky.social
&, Matt Platre. (1/x)
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Targeting of the barley cell-surface receptor SRF3 by the Blumeria hordei effector AVRA13 overlaps with AVRA13 recognition by MLA and the induction of NLR-mediated cell death.
Pathogens secrete effector proteins to promote virulence. Despite their recognition by barley Mla resistance genes, the structurally-related Blumeria hordei ( Bh ) AVRA effectors are maintained in the...
https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.01.08.698370
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Alexis Verger 🧬🧫🧪
10 days ago
Atlas of predicted protein complex structures across kingdoms
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.biopredictnavigator.cn
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Atlas of predicted protein complex structures across kingdoms - Nature Communications
Protein complexes are the machinery of life, yet mapping their structures across different species is challenging. This study presents an atlas of 1.1million cross-kingdom structures, revealing 181,67...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-70884-4
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Mauricio Contreras
Tiffany Lowe-Power stands with Minnesota
11 days ago
So jazzed for my colleague
@gittacoaker.bsky.social
for being elected as an AAAS Fellow! She's an outstanding scientist, leader, mentor, and colleague
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Mauricio Contreras
Ben Engel
12 days ago
This is super impressive and interesting
#TeamTomo
work by
@carter-lab.bsky.social
. Congrats everyone!! 🧪 🧶🧬
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Marc Somssich
12 days ago
#PlantScienceClassics
#20: Kinetin & Cytokinins. In 1955 Carlos Miller, Folke Skoog & co-workers describe the first
#Cytokinin
and its role in promoting cell division and growth promotion.
#Phytohormones
#PlantScience
#PlantDevelopment
pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1...
pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1...
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Hajk-Georg Drost
12 days ago
How much protein diversity can Life on Earth actually generate? With DIAMOND DeepClust, we show how billions of proteins across the tree of life can be clustered at low-identity for downstream analytics tasks. 📚Paper:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
💻Code:
github.com/bbuchfink/di...
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Mauricio Contreras
MPI for Biology Tübingen & Friedrich Miescher Laboratory
12 days ago
It’s time to say farewell to ERC Research Group Leader Thorsten Langner after nearly 3 years at the institute. He reflects on his time here, key milestones, and what’s next:
tinyurl.com/2vce2d6k
Congratulations on your new position—we wish you and your team all the best for the future!
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Bruno Ngou
12 days ago
Cell-surface receptors play key roles across many biological processes. In plants, these receptor families have undergone remarkable expansion. Here, we systematically review these receptors in
@theplantjournal.bsky.social
Happy to see this out!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
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Plant cell surface receptors
Plant cell surface receptors have evolved to perceive peptides, proteins, glycans, lipids, and small molecules through diverse ectodomains, integrating these inputs into distinct physiological output....
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tpj.70800
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Mauricio Contreras
Arc Institute
16 days ago
Over 250 million protein sequences are known, but fewer than 0.1% have confirmed functions. Today,
@genophoria.bsky.social
,
@bowang87.bsky.social
& team introduce BioReason-Pro, a multimodal reasoning model that predicts protein function and explains its reasoning like an expert would.
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Mauricio Contreras
The Sainsbury Laboratory
16 days ago
Exciting news! New findings from TSL and international collaborators reveal that the wheat receptor WAI3 forms an octameric resistosome, offering fresh insights into plant immune system structures and functions 🌱
@jonathandgjones.bsky.social
@kamounlab.bsky.social
www.tsl.ac.uk/news/breakth...
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Breakthrough study in plant immunity reveals previously unsuspected…
The wheat WAI3 receptor forms a novel defence-activating resistosome made of eight molecules, as revealed by an international collaboration led by The Sainsbury Laboratory
https://www.tsl.ac.uk/news/breakthrough-study-in-plant-immunity-reveals-previously-unsuspected-octameric-resistosome
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Mauricio Contreras
Boas Pucker
16 days ago
Completing "Plant Bioinformatics" 🌱 Students worked with CLI, big data, and cloud computing. Critically assessed papers and reproduced analyses. Alarming how often methods are incomplete or data is not shared. Teaching
#OpenScience
is crucial. 🔗
github.com/bpucker/teac...
@puckerlab.bsky.social
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Mauricio Contreras
MolPlantSci
18 days ago
Check out Manuel's work on P-bodies and biotic stress
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#MBP2026
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Mauricio Contreras
Gitta Coaker
18 days ago
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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The paradox of immune systems conservation between prokaryotes and eukaryotes - Nature Reviews Microbiology
The widespread prokaryotic immune systems, in particular restriction–modification, CRISPR–Cas and defensive toxin–antitoxin systems, are absent in eukaryotes, whereas relatively rare ones, such as Arg...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-026-01284-0
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Mauricio Contreras
Şuayb Üstün
18 days ago
Frederica Locci
@federicalocci.bsky.social
from
@mpipz.bsky.social
will talk about TIR-domain proteins in plant systemic resistance
#MBP2026
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Mauricio Contreras
Şuayb Üstün
18 days ago
We start the biotic interactions session at
#MBP2026
with
@mpcontreras.bsky.social
from
@zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social
who will talk about the regulation of a NLR immune receptor network
#plantscience
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Mauricio Contreras
PlantEvolution 🌱🌾
22 days ago
1/11 🔥 New preprint alert 🔥 We wanted to know what plants in the wild really care about. So we asked them 🎤. Here is what we learned: “Biotic-response networks are an important organizer of the transcriptome in wild Arabidopsis thaliana populations”
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Chenxin Li, PhD
about 1 month ago
$1B per day is about $42 million per hour. About 30 min worth of that spending can fund my lab for my ENTIRE career (~20 3-year NSFs or ~10 5-year R01s). Please wrap your head around that.
add a skeleton here at some point
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Mauricio Contreras
IPB Halle
about 1 month ago
We are inviting applications for a joint appointment: Director at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry Full Professor (W3) at MLU Apply by April, 24 via:
berufungsportal.uni-halle.de
Join us in advancing innovative research at the interface of chemistry and bioactive natural products.
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Mauricio Contreras
Marc Somssich
about 1 month ago
Another great article by
@mastroianni.bsky.social
on the current
#SciencePublishing
system. Don't publish with for-profit publishers like Elsevier, Springer Nature, et al. It's really simple. There are so many cool
#PlantScience
society journals.
#SciPub
See also:
bsky.app/profile/soms...
add a skeleton here at some point
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Mauricio Contreras
GreenRobust
about 1 month ago
Kick-off meeting of our GreenRobust cluster of excellence last week. Exciting times ahead for plant sciences by bringing together an extraordinary bunch of enthusiastic scientists and human beings!
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Mauricio Contreras
Alister Burt
about 1 month ago
Wonderful (and fun!) read from
@mastroianni.bsky.social
which finishes with a clear answer on how to solve the collective action problem of dismantling scientific publishing
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The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do
OR: the long overdue forest fire
https://open.substack.com/pub/experimentalhistory/p/the-one-science-reform-we-can-all?r=bfuf8&utm_medium=ios
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Mauricio Contreras
GetGenome
about 1 month ago
Attending @micronorwich Annual Conference? ReSay Podcast organising micro-quiz / mega-impact. You can register here
buff.ly/uP2iWNI
There are prizes on offer, £2 entry fee will go toward
@getgenome.bsky.social
supporting researchers across global south. Donations are matched too!
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Mauricio Contreras
Christian Landry
about 1 month ago
New paper alert: Paralog interference contributes to the preservation of genetic redundancy
www.cell.com/current-biol...
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Paralog interference contributes to the preservation of genetic redundancy
Duplicated self-interacting proteins can interact and interfere with each other’s function. Cisneros, Mattenberger, et al. show that selection against interfering loss-of-function alleles extends the ...
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(26)00145-4
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Mauricio Contreras
Erin Huiting
about 1 month ago
Cell death is a fundamental mechanism of antiviral immunity across diverse organisms, including bacteria. As my final PhD project with
@jbdsf.bsky.social
, I was curious whether cell death is required for successful immunity with the ancient cGAS pathway known as ‘CBASS.’ Spoiler – the answer is no!
add a skeleton here at some point
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Mauricio Contreras
GeminiTeamLab
about 1 month ago
RNA splicing generates a functionally specialized Rep protein isoform in geminiviruses — enabling timely control of the viral cycle. Strikingly, similar strategies might have evolved in DNA viruses infecting different kingdoms:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Spearheaded by
@delphinem-p.bsky.social
!
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Sophien Kamoun
about 2 months ago
Following the successful completion of the Series A funding round, our plant disease resistance start-up Resurrect Bio
@resurrectbio.bsky.social
is hiring for its London lab: (1/2) AI Research Scientist | Protein-Protein Interactions
jobs.recruit.charliehr.com/resurrect/ai...
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AI Research Scientist | Protein-Protein Interactions
Resurrect Bio
https://jobs.recruit.charliehr.com/resurrect/ai-research-scientist-protein-protein-interactions/view-job
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Mauricio Contreras
Alisia Fadini
about 1 year ago
Structural biology is in an era of dynamics & assemblies but turning raw experimental data into atomic models at scale remains challenging.
@minhuanli.bsky.social
and I present ROCKET🚀: an AlphaFold augmentation that integrates crystallographic and cryoEM/ET data with room for more! 1/14.
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Sophien Kamoun
about 2 months ago
We’re hiring! Postdoctoral Researcher / Research Assistant @KamounLab “Biology and Applications of Plant Immune Receptors”
www.tsl.ac.uk/working-at-t...
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Mauricio Contreras
Marc Somssich
about 2 months ago
A really cool
#PlantImmunity
paper showing that the ubiquitin-binding protein RH3 recruits PTI & ETI receptors into one large complex via ubiquitin chains, linking these pathways. Also goes well with this paper showing a link between BIK1 & NLRs via phosphorylation:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
add a skeleton here at some point
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Mauricio Contreras
bioRxiv Plant Bio
about 2 months ago
Ubiquitin recognition integrates plant immune signaling by cell-surface and intracellular receptors
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.06.703835v1
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GreenRobust
about 2 months ago
Our cluster of Excellence GreenRobust is looking for a scientific coordinator located at Heidelberg University. Please spread the word!
www.academics.com/jobs/scienti...
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Scientific coordinator at the GreenRobust location Heidelberg (f/m/d) - Universität Heidelberg
Universität Heidelberg looks for Scientific coordinator at the GreenRobust location Heidelberg (f/m/d) in Heidelberg - apply now!
https://www.academics.com/jobs/scientific-coordinator-at-the-greenrobust-location-heidelberg-f-m-d-universitaet-heidelberg-1105546
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Clémence Marchal
about 2 months ago
Please share! We are looking for a postdoctoral scientist (2 years, extension possible) starting from 01/05/2026 at
@ipbhalle.bsky.social
! The project focuses on plant immune receptor biochemistry and structural biology. Deadline 09/03/2026. Apply at:
ipb-halle.mhm.jobs/11-postdocto...
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Postdoctoral position in biology (m/f/d) (2/2026)
Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (Halle) offers a Postdoctoral position in Biology
https://ipb-halle.mhm.jobs/11-postdoctoral-position-in-biology-m-f-d-2-2026/en/job.html
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Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
2 months ago
Please share! PhD position (4 years) available in my group
@zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social
. We look for candidates with solid aptitude in computer science to cross disciplines and use cutting edge imaging to understand host infection by destructive plant pathogens.
uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...
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Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
2 months ago
Please share! My group at
@zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social
is offering a post-doctoral position (4 years). We look for a structural biologist with experience in Cryo-EM/Cryo-ET to investigate the mechanisms of host invasion by pathogenic fungi. Deadline February 28th!
uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...
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ZMBP
2 months ago
📢 Job alert!
@delaconcepcionjc.bsky.social
, junior group leader at
#ZMBP
, has 2 open positions (PhD and postdoc) to investigate appressoria formation in plant pathogenic
#fungi
using
#cryoEM
and
#cryoET
#EmmyNoether
#MPMI
#plantscijob
More info 👇
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Mauricio Contreras
Tolga Bozkurt
2 months ago
Exciting PhD positions on plant immunity and engineering plant disease resistance with an excellent supervisor
@jiorgoskourelis.bsky.social
. Strongly recommend.👇
add a skeleton here at some point
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Jiorgos Kourelis
2 months ago
📢 2 PhD Positions Available in Plant Immune Receptor Bioengineering at Imperial College London 🌱 Start: Oct 2026 📅 Deadline: 10 Feb 2026 🇬🇧 UK/settled status only 💰 Fully funded (48 months) ℹ️ Info:
shorturl.at/po61I
#PlantImmunity
#PlantPathology
#SyntheticBiology
🙏 Share with interested candidates!
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PhD Opportunities | Faculty of Natural Sciences | Imperial College London
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/life-sciences/postgraduate/research/phd-opportunities/
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Annalisa Bellandi
2 months ago
A new webinar series is born - ''MechanoBioTalks - Mechanics, Materials and Living Matter", to bring together and inspire researchers interested in biomechanics, biophysics and biology across different kingdoms of life. Join us! For info and registration visit
green-te.nl/activities/
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Activities - GreenTE
Activities Webinars ”MechanoBioTalks – Mechanics, Materials and Living Matter” is a webinar series supported by the GreenTE consortium and organized […]
https://green-te.nl/activities/
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@tim_stasevich
3 months ago
Happy New Year all. I know it's been a draining and difficult year for science in general, but wanted to share some good news: our intrabody paper has now been published in Science Advances with lots of additional data.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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AI-assisted protein design to rapidly convert antibody sequences to intrabodies targeting diverse peptides and histone modifications
AI-powered pipeline converts antibodies into functional intrabodies, enabling live-cell imaging of peptides and histone marks.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx8352
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Mauricio Contreras
Ashar Malik
3 months ago
An interesting way to look at encoded structural characters to build alignments and trees downstream. This takes structural phylogenetics one step further in the post-AlphaFold era.
#Evolution
#Science
#StrPhy
On Confidence Assessment in Structure-Aware Alignments
doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...
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Structome-AlignViewer: On Confidence Assessment in Structure-Aware Alignments
Abstract. Protein structure-based comparison provides a framework for uncovering deep evolutionary relationships that can escape conventional sequence-base
https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evag004
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