1/6 👻 Something strange in your liquid agar? Who you gonna call? Thermophile hunters. Our new @asm.org #MRA paper reports the complete genome sequence of Geobacillus stearothermophilus strain CS7089 isolated from a commercial agar preparation.

Happy to share our latest pre-print on the Druantia defense system. We find that Type III Druantia uses a cooperative helicase-nuclease mechanism to sense and degrade replication-associated forked DNA structures. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A🧵

Out Now! Conditional activation of Cas13 enforces lysogeny in a native type VI-A CRISPR host #MicroSky

🚨Preprint! Happy to share the research from my PhD “Genome delivery of a contractile tailed phage and its superinfection exclusion mechanism”. We use cryoEM to study the genome ejection of the phage T4, revealing how the tape measure protein regulates the process. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Phage-encoded CasPRs transcriptionally silence diverse CRISPR-Cas systems https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.23.707548v1

🚨Preprint alert - this is a big one! We transfer the revolutionary power of TnSeq to bacteriophages. Our HIDEN-SEQ links the "dark matter" genes of your favorite phage to any selectable phenotype, guiding the path from fun observations to molecular mechanisms. A thread 1/8

🚀New preprint from our lab! I am very excited to finally share what has been the main focus of my PhD for the past almost 3 years! It is about viral dark matter and a powerful tool we built to shed light on it. 🧬💡 Continue reading (🧵)

#mycrosky #synbio www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Bacteria can sense when a virus starts shredding their genome — by detecting methylated mononucleotides. Here’s the story of how we discovered the Metis defense system 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Surviving phage attack dynamically regulates bacterial immunity to defeat counterdefenses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.13.688357v1

📢Preprint out! Excited to share my final work from the @soreklab.bsky.social! We mined phage dark matter using structural features shared by anti-defense proteins (viral tools that help phages bypass bacterial immunity) to guide discovery. Found 3 new families targeting immune signaling!

Most people fail to appreciate just how groundbreaking McClintock's work truly was. Her transposon work was first presented in 1950 - before we knew, for example, "DNA is the genetic material." Long before most discoveries that we consider fundamental to the question of: "What is a gene?"

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

🚨 🧬 Updated preprint on the completed BASEL collection - what's new? Some fun with bacterial immunity and a new P22 relative infecting E. coli K-12. A thread 🧵