Excited to share our new paper out today in @science.org 🎉 We show that HGT via natural competence drives diversification of chromosomal integrons in V. cholerae 🤩 Below a 🧵 on key findings incl. background on natural competence in V. cholerae 1/ #microsky #phagesky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

on polyP and carboxysomes. intriguing #MicroSky

What if AI could invent enzymes that nature hasn’t seen? 👩‍🔬🧑‍🔬 Introducing 🪩 DISCO: Diffusion for Sequence-structure CO-design 📝 Blog: disco-design.github.io 📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.05181 💻 Code: github.com/DISCO-design...

I prefer the America where people care for one another.

Do we grow wiser as we age? I spent 15+ years chasing glam journals, wasting time and energy (and frustrating my team and co-authors). I don’t want to wake up at 70 and realize my life went into convincing a few editors my work was trendy enough. Enough. I’ll try to be smarter.

Open postdoc position in my lab on HGT and interbacterial competition. We seek candidates with a PhD in microbiology (or related fields)+ strong 1st-author publications. Curious, highly motivated, and dedicated team players ready to contribute fully are encouraged to apply. Details: tiny.cc/cz01101

Still one of my all time favorites

THANK YOU!

Check out our new review on binder discovery! In a fast-moving world, here are some thoughts we have in the moment. Congrats @jzy2799.bsky.social and Eddy!! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Keystone attendees beware of this phishing scam! They've even got the correct name for the upcoming meeting that I am indeed presenting at.

Predicting protein-protein interactions (PPIs) at proteome scale can take months with co-folding models due to the massive all-vs-all comparisons required. We are excited to announce FlashPPI, a contrastive learning framework that predicts proteome wide physical interfaces in minutes. 1/🧵

How to look under the hood of protein sequence functional annotations? We have a DUF that is sometimes labeled with 2 different types of "___ase". One traces back to google's ProtNLM (natural language model) (I think), the other ... ? No clear structural homologs with experimental functions.

'Cribraria Cluster – A cluster of 1.5mm tall, immature Cribraria rufa slime moulds in ancient woodland, south Buckinghamshire, England.' Photograph: Barry Webb www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Large Serine Integrase fans: Multiple structures of 2 different integrases, with and without their RDFs. Amazing machines, different details, same concepts! Our work on SPbeta: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Or friends' work on PhiC31: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #SyntheticBiology #phage

Jane Richardson was born #OTD in 1941 + Developed the Richardson (ribbon) diagram to represent proteins' 3D structure (becoming a standard representation for protein structures) + MacArthur Fellow, 1985 + Elected, Nat'l Academy of Sciences, 1991 + President, Biophysical Society, 2012 #WomenInSTEM

Great resource!

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Sun trying to shine through freezing fog rising from a partially- frozen Lake Michigan. Trying to come up with a political analogy about making rainbows out of less-than-pleasant circumstances, but failing, so please just enjoy the pic.

What's larger, a protein or its templating mRNA ? > The mRNA is much larger. ⬛ 𝐀 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 -- 𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 & 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬 -- 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐮𝐥 𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡. The figure shows myoglobin protein drawn to scale next to its mRNA template. The coding sequence of an mRNA ...

🧵For those who don't know, this has been in the works for a while. There have been plans in the works to close down and consolidate some of the libraries with NASA. But the closure of the Goddard library was never part of the plan. Planning was being done to make Goddard the hub/main library.

Something hopeful to ponder

Tidied up an old desk drawer, found this. It was transcribed from a Brandeis science library bathroom wall in the 1980s:

I don't remember requests like this before! No deadline either. Have others been getting them?

A physics demo seen from Chicago this AM: steam rising from our side of Lake Michigan into sunny but frigid air, and condensing into snow clouds on the Michigan side.

Thank you for publicizing what is going on! Even us grateful NSF grantees find it hard to know.

Wonderful history, but that picture with the positive supercoiling node has always bugged me.

The top 10 people of 2025 @nature.com who shaped science. Recognizes Dr. Susan Monarez, the CDC Director who was "fired for holding the line on scientific integrity" www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

love it!

Anybody else bugged by the loose definitions in headlines like this? For example, "Breakfast cereal" could be plain oatmeal or shredded wheat, or it could be candy-in-a-bowl. They're not the same thing!

while home sick yesterday I watched a history channel thing that claimed the discovery really came from Fleming's hobby of "agar art" with different-colored bacteria. Was there any truth to that?

OMG this is amazing.

1/9 Metagenomics lets us read microbiomes in nature without cultivation, but writing (editing) them in their native context is still a major challenge. Meet MetaEdit: a platform for pathway-scale metagenomic editing inside the gut microbiome. science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Awesome paper from Kathy Collins' lab Different repair pathways support intact or truncated insertions by R2 retrotransposon protein | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

way to go @cnn.com to put this little tidbit of info behind a paywall.

👏 👏 👏 www.wunc.org/education/20...

Postdoctoral fellowship opportunity at the U of Chicago: biologicalsciences.uchicago.edu/research/chi...

I love AlphaFold—but please include PAE (Predicted Aligned Error) plots for every “interaction.” Pretty PDBs ≠ proof. If the PAE doesn’t show an interface, it ain’t one. Show the plots. Structural biology's reputation is on the line.

Might not be the best use of limited funds, depending on what the structurally-based quesiton was!

Congrats to @utah.edu's Wes Sundquist on the cool honor. Had a chance to chat with him a few times when I was in college and he just came off as such a smart and humble guy. attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff...

Really cool! But Bluesky has flipped your picture over - it now shows positively supercoiled left-handed DNA :-(.

Happy to share a new publication on Mechanistic Coupling of Enzyme Activities at the Replisome in JBC. We #Traklab compare and contrast strategies used across organisms to coordinate the many enzymatic processes that occur during DNA replication. Hope it is helpful. doi.org/10.1016/j.jb...

Scientists often engineer microbes, like E. coli, to make drugs and other molecules. But what if, instead, we could isolate ALL the components of a cell into little vials and sell them? How much would, say, 1 liter of cells be worth? The answer, it turns out, is about $600,000.

This could be a metaphor for so many things in society, international relations, etc ...

1/3 To those interested in microbial iron & metal transport: In 1992, the late JB Neilands (UCB), the pioneer in the study of Fe transport entrusted me with his collection of purified siderophores from a wide range of microbes—many of them unique chemical species that can no longer be reproduced

I don’t know who needs to hear this but the CDC is being eviscerated right now. America is not going to have any kind of outbreak response capacity after tonight. Americans’ health data is no longer secure. Say goodbye to federal public health in any capacity. It’s a disaster. We won’t recover.

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

🚨 Are you an alum from one of the 9 universities Trump is attempting to extort right now? ✍️ Sign this petition to defend your university, free speech, and democracy. I signed. This is a time for courage, not capitulation. #JustSayNo #Compact 🧪🧠🧬 (context in thread)

The Peters lab is looking for a new team member! The role transposons play in evolution, basic mechanisms regulating transposition, and applying transposons as tools for genome modification with a special focus on guide RNA-directed transposition. cornell.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/CornellCaree...