Come and work with me and @ariannebabina.bsky.social on #Streptomyces evolution and antibiotic production Origins of a tangled bank: Adaptation and evolution in antibiotic-producing Streptomyces www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate... please repost

🔥🔥🔥

Congrats!!

Phage "satellites" that produce capsids but have no genes to produce tails have puzzled scientists for a long time. These are abundant as prophages in bacteria, but it was unclear how they can infect without tails Now, Penadés & co show that they hijack tails from other phages. Incredible!

We discovered a new horizontal gene transfer mechanism: tail-less cf-PICIs hijack free phage tails extracellularly, forming infectious chimeric virions that drive both intra- and inter-species transfer among bacteria. @jonaszpatkowski.bsky.social @tcostalab.bsky.social @jrpenades.bsky.social

Did you get the email I sent 😭

Picking blueberries 💙🐦

#phagesky www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Congratulations Franklin, Yi and all the authors!! Very beautiful work!

Thank you to everyone who attended the 3rd UK MGE workshop. What an incredible few days of science and community building! Next stop: York 2026, hosted by @pcmfogg.bsky.social. See you all next year! #UKMGE

1/ Excited to share our latest work on gene transfer agents (GTAs) in Caulobacter crescentus, led by Emma Banks in collaboration with Pavol Bardy and Mai Nguyen from York!!! See a brief thread below. shorturl.at/o6S1w

Good papers, like good wine, need maturing. I'm proud and thrilled to share our work on genomic epidemiology of K.pneumoniae in Valencia and differential transmission patterns of resistances, part of Neris Garcia's PhD thesis and the NLSAR consortium. go.uv.es/td8iL4c #publichealth #EpiSky 🧬🖥️

🧪 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/...

Three to one, tales! (✓)

Interested in fighting AMR? Come and join us at St Andrews. applications are open until 15th May to students worldwide!

"That telomere phages are so prevalent means that they are a selective force, one that we know little about. We now want to understand how the telomere-toxin is secreted and also understand how this ‘telocin’ wheedles its way into unsuspecting bacterial neighbors” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Unique investigation of some errors in long read assemblers. In particular these remarkably chimeric contigs are 😱, if rare.... Improving long read assemblers is definitely the space to be in when it comes to the future of metagenomics, as short reads won't be part of it 😉

New paper @isme-microbes.bsky.social : Among a sample of 1044 vibrio phages, we found 17 new Schizotequatrovirus with large genomes (>250kb), a broad host range, and yet a low frequency in our samples (?!). #MicroSky #PhageSky

The BASEL collection of E. coli #phages is limited by its host strain. @humollidorentina.bsky.social @damienpiel.bsky.social @aharms485.bsky.social &co use a modified host to add 36 new phages, revealing roles of O-antigen in recognition & R-M systems in immunity @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4jirGvX

Congratulations Alex and the team!! Nice one!

We welcome on BlueSky Alfred Fillol Salom @alfredfisa.bsky.social, the leader of the The Ecology of Mobile Genetic Elements group at our research institute #microsky 🧫🦠🧪 #phages #virology #viruses

Why the ground is always breaking?

We would love feedback on a new NCBI-BLAST service we are launching today: sky-blast.com Under the hood it's the same BLAST executable and databases provided by NCBI, with a replica of the NIH's interface - providing an alternative to the US gov service that's less congested, faster & more reliable

New online! Interactions and evolutionary relationships among bacterial mobile genetic elements

New preprint on how a minimal Salmonella kinase needs a host kinase to activate it. Work led by @timeshpillay.bsky.social and another great collaboration with @katrinrittinger.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

More phage-encoded defense systems mediating interviral competition 😯

Wait... what !? 😱 A new family of RNA-guided systems in prokaryotes ! Mind-blowing !

co-chief

An experimental #AI system from Google, designed to support researchers, could supercharge science 🔬✨ Our researchers were among the first to test the 'co-scientist'—replicating a decade of work in just two days. More ⤵️ www.imperial.ac.uk/news/261293/...

New version of DefenseFinder available defensefinder.mdmlab.fr (& cli) Now encompassing 263 systems (+111 this year..!). Thanks @ftesson.bsky.social, DefenseFinder grandmaster. Full list of systems here: defense-finder-models/List_system_article.md at master · mdmparis/defense-finder-models

“I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain”

@jonaszpatkowski.bsky.social and I pinpointed tail piracy as a new mechanism of horizontal gene transfer and explained the wide spread of cf-PICIs among different bacterial species and viromes.

Hey, my new book is out - read it as consolation for that terrible presentation: bit.ly/OOYM