🎉 New year, NEW PREPRINT! Bacteria exhibit astonishing genetic diversity, but where do new genes come from? My best friend Arya Kaul (/labmate in the @baym lab) investigates how advantageous deletions can spawn new genes - "deletion-born fusions." 🧵:

What is the best strategy to win any contest? Eliminate your opponents of course. Recently, my friend @fernpizza.bsky.social showed how plasmids compete intracellularly (check out his paper published in Science today!). With @baym.lol, we now know they can fight. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 Excited to share our new paper is out! 🎉 We show how interactions within gut microbiomes allow certain antibiotic-resistant E. coli strains to persist even without antibiotics, helping explain how resistance is maintained in the human gut. Now published in @natcomms.nature.com rdcu.be/eOf63

✨Célia Souque just showcased the outcomes of the 12th Microbial Bioinformatics Hackathon at IMMEM XIV. She brilliantly presented the first sneak-peek of PORT – Plasmid Outbreak Reporting Tool! 🧬 Looking forward to continuing this collaboration with PORT! #IMMEM #Hackathon #Plasmids #ESGEM #ESGMAP

hey bluesky 👋 visa hurdles mean I’m looking for opportunities outside the US. I’m a computational biologist (bacterial + phage genomics, postdoc in Koonin’s group @ NIH). I am interested in teaming up on funding apps. reach out if this resonates!

ESGMAP is now on LinkedIn and Bluesky! We published our first newsletter (lnkd.in/dUe43t8y). It introduces us, our mission, activities, and ways to get involved. Fill out our members' survey, and associate your publications with the group. Follow us for updates on the mobile elements and plasmids.

The Wadsworth Center is expanding it's research focus on #virology /vector-borne diseases! www.asmcareerconnections.org/job/research-scientist-5-g-31/78488664/ This is a unicorn assistant prof equivalent position with 12-month hard money salary and no teaching commitments (!) Reposts appreciated 🙏

(1/7) Very excited to share my first PhD preprint on the interactions of two of my favorite mobile genetic elements: phages and group II introns! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New Research Assistant position available in my lab to work on a project testing the efficacy of pills dependent #phage against clinical isolates of enteric bacteria . Part of a growing phage research theme in my lab my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

🧪 Finally out after peer review, our work showing that "Mobile #Integrons carry Phage Defense Systems" is now published in Science 🎉 Short 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Cool preprint! The smallest Darwinian entity is a little smarter than we thought... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Any idea when the abstract submission portal opens for IMMEM XIV? 😊 @esgem-sg.bsky.social

RNA xkcd.com/3056

Ground-breaking work by one of the most amazing of scientists. A must read for all plasmids afficionado (and and any evolutionary biologist in general!)

This paper has been a long time coming: We looked at the genomes of historical bacterial samples over a century to look for trends of antibiotic resistance genes, finding multiple instances of them in infections before the age of antibiotics, but an increase in both frequency and mobility after

Genomic resistance in historical clinical isolates increased in frequency and mobility after the age of antibiotics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.16.633422v1

Delighted to share the first peer-reviewed paper from our team @camvetschool.bsky.social where we investigate the ecological dynamics of Enterobacteriaceae in the human gut #microbiome: www.nature.com/articles/s41... @naturemicrobiol.bsky.social

Our review is out in Nature Reviews Genetics! rdcu.be/d5AY2 We show how phylogeny-based methods can resolve the problem of non-independence in genomic datasets. These methods must be considered an essential part of the comparative genomics toolkit. @lauriebelch.bsky.social @stuwest.bsky.social

Sharing three fully funded PhD opportunities to join my lab at Queen’s to work on topics spanning bacterial pathogens, antibiotic resistance, microbial interactions, & mobile genetic elements 🦠. Closing dates in January and February, and open to international candidates 🌍 Projects detailed below ⬇️

In case you missed it: @matthewjshepherd.bsky.social surveyed the clinical literature to reveal how #AMR evolves within patients, why eco/evo mechanisms vary among infections, & what we can do better to improve treatments www.nature.com/articles/s41... #MicroSky

Gosh parts of me hate the concept of ChatGPT with a passion, but I have to acknowledge it's supremacy when trying to debug a Snakemake pipeline, which I am not convinced are made to be understood by humans 😅

Volume 2 of the #AMR Starter Pack is here! go.bsky.app/EUY2FUJ Follow these amazing people along with those in Vol. 1 go.bsky.app/KkZfvrh And don't forget to pin the Antimicrobial Resistance feed to get all the AMR posts in one place bsky.app/profile/did:...

Don't know how to do polls in Bluesky, but am very curious to know how what the #microsky thinks. Genes that increase fitness in natural conditions are: A. Over-represented on plasmids B. Over-represented on the chromosome C. Evenly distributed between plasmids and the chromosome

That's low-key one of my favorite thing about Oslo - the city center is very often car free, and the few cars are often electric, which makes them much less audible. Going to back to a 'proper' big city (Stockholm) for a week felt weird!

Please sign up, it will be fun! Open for all with an interest in AMR and genomics (in the UK and elsewhere). www.targetamr.org.uk (and please give @target-amr.bsky.social a follow!)

Get ready to dance, our paper – Phage DisCo: targeted discovery of bacteriophages by co-culture – has been pre-printed! 🪩 This has been a really fun project to work on with @sianowen.bsky.social, @baym.lol, @nquinoneso.bsky.social, and our two talented undergrads Kesther and Carmen!

Very glad to see this properly out and open access from my time with @baym.lol We've learnt so much about antibiotic resistance evolution already, and yet so many outstanding and fascinating questions remain, at all levels of selection. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

The first review article from my lab, helmed by @celiasouque.bsky.social, "From Petri Dishes to Patients to Populations: Scales and Evolutionary Mechanisms Driving Antibiotic Resistance" is now online and open access at Annual Reviews Microbiology: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Very excited to be on the way to #ESCAIDE in Stockholm, and in particular to meet old and new EPIET/EUPHEM fellows 😄 On that note, if you are related to the fellowship and are not on this starter pack, let me know! go.bsky.app/EDqC8CG

Here's a starter pack for early career researchers in evolutionary biology. I prioritized the most-junior folks, and this list quickly filled up with undergrads, grad students, and postdocs. Might do another list later, but I'm tired. Have fun everyone! 🐒 #evobio go.bsky.app/MzND7nX

Phylogenetics skeeps: any recommendations for a review of different approaches for building phylogenetic trees?

I just made a starter pack on Ecology and Evolution of AMR. 🦠 ⚡ 💊 Feel free to suggest names and I’ll add them as soon as I can!! go.bsky.app/CwEzc79

If you follow me, you should definetely follow the @uac-uu.bsky.social account! I post there as part of my work as coordinator of the center, and will all be about #AMR and #antibiotics! Help me get the center’s words to the right audience!! 👇🏻👇🏻

Microbiology Education and Outreach peeps, I tried to find all the folk here I could and make this, please let me know who I've missed and I'll add them go.bsky.app/QYgSwS6

Mobile Elements Starter Pack on BlueSky! Interested in plasmids, phages, ICEs, transposons, integrons, and all things accessory genome? Follow this curated list of researchers and labs doing exciting work in mobile elements.

Question for the (ex-)postdocs! I am co-corresponding author of soon-to-be-out paper (yay!), but my current academic email is tied with my postdoc. I hate putting an email that will become a dud, but feel personal (gmail) email look less professional? In that case, email of PI is also included.

Big career announcement!! A few weeks ago I was offered an interview and site visit for a tenure-track Professor of Microbiology position at a dream location. But - I declined! Here is why ... (TLDR: enthusiastically saying "No, thank you" to academia) #MicroSky 1/8

The formatted version of our multi-niche, multi-year plasmid genomic epidemiology study is finally available (elifesciences.org/articles/85302), but more importantly, I’d love to see future studies make use of the 1000s of Enterobacterales hybrid assemblies we generated: zenodo.org/records/7948...

Continuing on my #sulfa discovery journey 🦠🧫 by learning that we owe the Food and Drug Administration to sulfa drugs😮Their discovery led to a craze and spread of badly prepared sulfa 'elixirs' which caused mass poisoning, and the push to regulate pharmaceuticals! en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_...

Check out our last work with Celine Loot, Ole Skovgaard, @amazeld.bsky.social and @sanmillan.bsky.social. We have deleted the Superintegron from V. cholerae! A long-awaited feat in the field!! Despite losing 3% of the genome, the strain remains phenotipically identical across Manu conditions!! 😵

OK but like, could the new frontier of open access be book chapters? There is nothing worse than a very promising paper being just that out of reach, especially when a physical copy can't even be found on campus. (and also what are the benefits as an author if no one can't access it 😅)

UK research fellowship interview season is upon us - here are some tips to help you prepare! Featuring a list of 100(!) popular Q&A questions elisagranato.com/how-to-apply...

Oh I should have added a 🦠🧫 - still getting used to the #Microsky thing!

Reading a bit about the history of antibiotics. Sulfa drugs were widely used before penicillin became a thing. Why does penicillin get all the glory? Simply bad PR from sulfa, or was penicillin just that much better?

This is a great opportunity👇 If you want to be stateside, I’m also searching for a similar role 🧪🧬

Awesome postdoc opportunity with a great supervisor!

Tonight new experience was bonsaï making 😮 Surprised at how fun it was!

I'm recruiting PhD students for Oct 24 start at University of Bath. Fully funded for UK students only. If interested in developing data structures/algorithms for bacterial genomics, or exploring plasmid epidemiology, or ML/AI on bacterial/phage geno/pheno data, give me a call!

Hey friends! I'm Elisa, and I study microbes and how they fight each other 🦠⚔️ My favorite things are: science, cats, and explaining science with cats. Based in Oxford but a Bavarian at heart 🥨