Stop by to chat about your research goals and learn more about how we can help. Help me out and take some taffy and a notebook - I do NOT want to lug it on my return flight! 😮‍💨

Don't have time to meet now? You can email questions to [email protected], or get a quote on our website. We'd be delighted to work with you on your next big genomics project! 🧬

We're sponsoring the University of Maryland's Molecular and Cellular Biology Department Retreat! Visit our table to: • Grab saltwater taffy and a notebook! • Ask about prepaid Insights Vouchers to preserve spending power of expiring grant funds • Get sequencing advice for your next big project

FWIW, we send nearly all our sequencing to @seqcoast.bsky.social and have never been disappointed. Great work!

New in JB: Conaway, Hogan et al. link QS and phosphate metabolism in P. aeruginosa, with implications of pathogenesis. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @asm.org #JBacteriology

Great afternoon with friends at @seqcoast.bsky.social esp @microbigal.bsky.social Our business is growing and sequencing and analysis services are better and more diverse than ever. Delighted they sponsored the best GRC, full stop!

Consistent with so much of what I’ve heard and observed. Private funders don’t want to pay to keep people employed & freezers running – they take for granted that they can just piggyback off of those things being federally subsidized, & just cover relatively minor expenses like “reagents”

The latest publication from our lab! The famous "glomalin" from arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi is not a protein but a polysaccharide from AM fungi, so we renamed it "glomalose". Glomalin-related proteins are bacterial proteins stuck in this glomalose. nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Our work on the facial skin microbiome of non-human primates is out in mSystems! We show there is no close relative of Cutibacterium on the faces of gorillas and chimps at the Lincoln Park Zoo, furthering the mysterious origin of the dominant human skin colonizer. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

This study was: -done by immigrant scientists, who are now being turned away from the United States by the Trump regime, -funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, which is being defunded and purged by the Trump regime -hosted at a public university experiencing vast Trump regime funding freezes

Great thread. Conducting placebo-controlled trials of items known to be relatively safe and effective is unethical.

I got hit by some rather sudden and extreme financial hardship so if anyone is in need of remote wetlab contract research, strictly BSL1, do let me know. Currently scrambling for gigs. Plant, Bacterial, Archaeal Non-model Bioeng Custom Lab Hardware Turn Key Genetic Design Please repost for reach 💚

Excited to share that our story on S. aureus antagonism by Malassezia is live today in Current Biology! The paper has changed a lot since the preprint with the very exciting addition of having identified the antimicrobial effector generated by M. sympodialis. authors.elsevier.com/c/1kwzj3QW8S...

every story about mass pollinator die-off leads with "this is a mystery, what could cause this" and then ten paragraphs down it's like "oh yeah we're spraying all the bugs with poison, the poison designed to kill bugs"

Here's a similar one that is still available. That's how it works. www.etsy.com/listing/1879...

This image was mysteriously super popular on another platform this month. I already sold the painting, so an art friend was like "make a limited edition print, just this once!" 🤦

I'm sure y'all are fucking tired of me but one thing I wanna say upfront is that I am brainstorming on here how to talk about what we as academic scientists and experts do so that other people in our country can understand what will be lost.

This is an understatement. We have already lost our scientific edge. Mass personnel cuts, lost grant support, gutting of pipeline programs, and the uncertainty about the future has already impacted our competitiveness and future generations of scientists. We just don’t see it yet. But we will.

Just received the email that my recent appointment to a BSC, which was supposed to be until June 2029, was terminated effective immediately.

You want to learn about microbiology from a fantastic lineup of speakers on a beautiful Greek island? PhD students apply now for the @EMBO | @FEBSnews Lecture Course The New Microbiology! Registration: 1 Apr 2025 Course: 03 – 11 Sep 2025 | Spetses, Greece meetings.embo.org/event/25-new...

In my 25 years since high school I’ve seen 1. HIV/AIDS go from death sentence to manageable with drugs 2. Cystic fibrosis go from pretty much an extended death sentence to manageable with drugs 3. Sickle cell go from a horrible disease to (almost maybe) cured by gene therapy Simply incredible

It's not too late to cash in on your good luck! ☘️💰🧬 See details below to save on your next NGS project:

I have been doing entirely too much earnest posting about deep things recently, I need to do a proper thread about hippo testicles or something just to keep myself sane. Oh by the way hippos have migratory testicles.

I received one of the 232 NIH grant "terminations" sent to scientists at Columbia last night. My research focuses on improving maternal and child health in the US. Also affected: ongoing clinical trials, research training programs, and research centers that aim to improve the health of Americans.

they’re treating medical research as some kind of favor to bestow, rather than what it is — arduous painstaking and unprofitable work done for all Americans this will slow Alzheimer’s and other brain research, not help it in net, patients will suffer

*Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...

I’m thrilled to share my first ever publication, now published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... With mentorship from the amazing @ksxue.bsky.social, I looked at how the outcomes of species introductions to microbial communities are influenced by the number of introduced microbes.

Very much this.

There’s been some talk on here about communicating more with undergrads about science funding, policies, outlook etc. I admit I was skeptical there would be interest. I polled my course. 70% were interested in having a discussion. The other 30% were “maybe interested.” 0% were not interested.

Transgenic mice are not transgender mice. Thanks for coming to my TED talk

The Kennedy Op-Ed: Don’t Ignore the Dog Whistles Over the weekend, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy wrote an op-ed suggesting that parents vaccinate their kids with the MMR vaccine, and has widely been seen as a change of heart. But if you have been following anti-vaxxers for a long time, the op-ed is…

Wait until they learn about mating type switching in yeast, which is (I don't make the news; I only report it) initiated by the HO endonuclease.

I'm incredibly honored by this opportunity to serve as President-Elect of @asm.org starting this summer. Looking forward to working with the Board, ASM leadership ,and staff to help advance the microbial sciences. I'm also glad to share my Vision statement, please join us! asm.org/Press-Releas...

Francis Collins led the mapping of the human genome, and chose to do big scientific to benefit the public. He is a a former NIH Director. He just resigned his position in government. His resignation letter: www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/u...

Excited to share our work with @pjplanet.bsky.social and @ahmedmicrobes.bsky.social tracking Staph aureus transmission across the NICU using genomics!! This study was co-led by the amazing @qianxuan.bsky.social and Lakshmi Srinivasan, and made possible by the @centermicrobialmed.bsky.social

Announcing our NEW Bacterial Profiling workflow! A comprehensive solution that combines strain typing, AMR/virulence factor detection, and outbreak analysis under one powerful pipeline. Here's an example use case about AMR in Acinetobacter baumannii: seqcoast.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/EeuFKo...

Just some amazing signs up in a congressional office building. Whoever did this… hero(es).

Today, while talking about sequencing, I got to give the history of DNA polymerase as one of the great basic science discoveries. I didn’t asked how amazing is it that we found this not by looking for biomedical discoveries but just because we were curious.

Maybe corny but it was helpful for me to hear Henry Rollins saying "this is not time to be dismayed, this is punk rock time, this is what Joe Strummer trained you for... You can be thunderous in your own life, to the eight people around you. That rubs off... Goodness is viral"

Did you miss our "We Love You Savings" Valentine's Day promo? Your ☘️ lucky day ☘️ might be just around the corner! Keep an eye on your inbox for details soon. Not on our email list yet? Send us a message to sign up here: seqcoast.com/contact/

Really exciting work: The Salmonella Colicin Col1b cannot only KILL a competing E. coli population, but also AMPLIFY metabolic contributions of susceptible bacteria by liberating β-gal… From @nic-ler.bsky.social. @kroegerlab.bsky.social, Andrew Cameron and others ‼️ academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

➡️ NIH grants in '23 included $26B of direct costs and $9B of F&A = 26% of total costs or 35% of total direct costs. These are LOW overhead rates for any R&D-intensive industry. Academic biomedical research is an efficient bargain. ➡️ Every $1 of NIH support generates ~$2.50 of economic activity.

Just a reminder that the HPV vaccine literally PREVENTS CANCER and the series can be started as early as 9 years of age.

We're proud to have contributed to this great work by Brian Hsu's group at Virginia Tech! We can help with your next sequencing project, too: seqcoast.com/contact/

What the shit "For FY26 we are told about plans to reduce the NSF budget by 50%-75% - such reduction will mean no new awards for at least a year, elimination of divisions, merging of programs." nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-...

Every scientist, long before they were a scientist, was a little kid who stood in front of a fish tank or stared up at the stars or turned over a rock to look at the bugs underneath and said “wow”. On the best days, working in science still feels like that.

I had two grant proposals up for review in the NIH Bacterial Virulence (BV) study section. It was canceled without notice this morning. Without those grants, my lab must close within a year. And so the purge of scientific research in the US continues 🤬 #MicroSky 🦠🧫🧪🧬🔬

People have been sending me more blue food swabs that our students are having fun analyzing 🤩

F99/R00 AND K99/R00 DIVERSITY AWARD APPLICANTS If you have applied for a F99/R00 or K99/R00 Diversity award and the study section for review is not listed on your eRA Commons page, please reach out to me. DM me, email [email protected], Signal jeremymberg.78 THANK YOU

It has been brought to my attention that my article has been censored to exclude certain terms: asm.org/Articles/202... web.archive.org/web/20250114... #MicroSky