Nitrogen Obsession by Roberto — A brief history of how organisms get their nitrogen.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers, like @catarmbruster.bsky.social are exploring whether microbes can help clean up what the steel industry left behind. 🧪 #WomenInSTEM www.cmu.edu/mcs/news-eve...

Congrats to Anish Pyne for winning the People’s Choice Award in tonight’s 3 Minute Thesis competition @cmu.edu 🥳🥳🥳 @cmuscience.bsky.social

Madness. A bacterium with a 10kb genome, lost replication initiation, translation.., relies on symbiotic host. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to announce our new journal from @isme-microbes.bsky.social ISME Host Microbe is live and now accepting submissions. Look forward to receiving your papers! #Microsky 🧫 🦠

New in JB: Mike Cashel is known internationally for his work on "magic spot", or (p)ppGpp, that serves as a key regulator of bacteria physiology. Hinman & Gottesman remember Dr. Cashel. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @asm.org #JBacteriol

My lab went outside! Check out this article (and video!) about a new project in my lab @cmuscience.bsky.social www.cmu.edu/mcs/news-eve...

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Congratulations, @animrprfct.bsky.social! Best of luck and looking forward to watching you present in the finals for 3MT! @cmuscience.bsky.social

How does treatment induced antibiotic resistance happen in real-world infections? We analysed 25k Pseudomonas isolates from 180 patients in a clinical trial to find out! TLDR: The ecological and evolutionary paths are surprisingly diverse & complex even in patients receiving identical treatment…

Starvation-independent alarmone production inhibits translation through GTP depletion - bioRxiv from @heatherfeaga.bsky.social #ppGpp #Bsubtilis

We call it Greenfield to confuse the Vikings. #pittsburgh

Congrats to Erin and Betsy for passing their qualifying exams last week!!!! Officially 3 PhD candidates in the lab @cmuscience.bsky.social now! 😎

Summer REU in biofilms! Pls share. www.binghamton.edu/centers/biof...

Congrats to Sean, Will, and co-authors! Shoutout to @cmuscience.bsky.social Quantitative Biology & Bioinformatics (QBB) MS student Isabelle D'Amico from my lab for her creative work on this cool collaboration!

Our last two guest lectures in Ecology @cmuscience.bsky.social were part of our theme thinking of infection as an ecologist (human = environment). First, Dr. Yasmin Hilliam (Bomberger Lab at Dartmouth) discussed how respiratory viral infection changes nutrients in airways, impacting microbiomes.

Our latest guest lecture in CMU Ecology class was Dr. Gus Ramirez (CalState LA @zombiephylotype.bsky.social) discussing research cruises, ocean biogeochemistry, & microbe-octopi interactions at sea mounts. Stunning & mind boggling to hear how you sample this stuff that is 1000s of meters underwater.

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

The evolutionary and ecological consequences of cooperation -in American Naturalist by @stuwest.bsky.social, @annadewar.bsky.social, @ryosukeiritani.bsky.social, Laurence Belcher, and @asgriffin.bsky.social www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

Today’s guest speaker in Ecology @cmuscience.bsky.social was perfect for Halloween: Arkadiy Garber @ironark.bsky.social from the McCutcheon Lab at ASU, discussing bacterial endosymbionts that support the junk food diets of sap-feeding insects! 😈

Microbiologist Paula Welander studies fossils, but not dinosaur bones or ammonite imprints. Instead, she looks for microscopic clues left behind by microbes that lived millions of years ago.

My department at UTK is hiring! 🧪🧫 We are hiring two Assistant Professors, one in Microbial Drivers of Chronic Disease and one in Quantitative Microbe-Plant-Environment Interactions! Come join our growing department of microbiologists. Knoxville is a great place to live!

We had our first guest lecturer in my Ecology class @cmuscience.bsky.social today! Dr. Delaney Miller from the Handelsman lab at Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (@widofficial.bsky.social) & HHMI gave an absolutely beautiful talk on how microbes in the rhizosphere impact plant development.

🚨 Microbiologists! We are recruiting Assistant / Associate Professors in 3 collaborative areas of our U. Pittsburgh School of Medicine. 1) MMG (my dept): fundamental research in med micro 2) Peds ID / I4Kids institute 3) Center for Vaccine Research 🔗 to all 3 w/info: www.linkedin.com/posts/vaughn...

How complex functions, with important physiological and evolutionary impacts get repeatedly and efficiently transferred across genomes? That’s what we explored using one of the fastest-evolving loci in Bacteria: the capsule locus. The paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Thread👇

‬‬Hexokinase 2 (HK2) is known for its metabolic role in #glycolysis. This study shows that it also functions as an #RNAbindingProtein that regulates mRNA translation, particularly of SOX10, promoting #melanoma cell proliferation independently of glycolysis @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3ViI1qL

Long-term monitoring of a North American cheese cave reveals mechanisms and consequences of fungal adaptation Penicillium solitum over 8 years in a cheese cave => green-to-white shift @currentbiology.bsky.social from @benwolfe.bsky.social with @kellerlab.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

Neuroscientist Alison Barth @cmu.edu on the science behind Severance & work/life separation 🤓 www.cmu.edu/mcs/news-eve...

Happy to finally see this out! Bassam El Halfi (@bassamhafi.bsky.social - my first rotation student when I started my post-doc in @geiselbiofilm.bsky.social) did an amazing job investigating mechanisms of interspecies metabolic interactions. Check it out! #microsky journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Awesome faculty position alert! Tenure-track assistant professor position in Evolutionary Biology, with a focus on organismal responses to environmental change. Please help spread the word! apply.interfolio.com/173889

On our way to the Parsek/Woz retreat in Leavenworth, WA!

Here is a demonstration of ice nucleation protein made by Pseudomonas syringe in my #Bio350 #Micronauts in my #Microbiology course at @univpugetsound @ASMicrobiology

Bacterial cell widening alters periplasmic size and activates envelope stress responses Kerwyn Huang, @typaslab.bsky.social et al find that E. coli outer-membrane protein RcsF senses reduced periplasm thickness due to increased cell width, & activates Rcs signaling www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

By comparing bronchial and nasal mucus, researchers find that mucus' ability to neutralize influenza A virus varies with the anatomical origin and correlates with the abundance of triglycerides & specific sialylated glycoproteins and glycolipids. #mSphere: journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

The newish PI styrofoam box collection to winter cat shelter pipeline 👩‍🔬

I cannot fully put into words what publishing this Review has meant to me, so I leave you with how we closed the paper. "The humble bacterium is still a relevant tool for the study of the underlying mechanisms that are conserved throughout life." 🧪🧫🧬📚 doi.org/10.1093/gene...

We are hiring! The Dept of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics is looking for faculty at the Assistant or Associate professor level (tenure track). Please consider joining our vibrant microbiology and immunology community at the University of Pittsburgh School of medicine

Our high-precision metagenomic strain caller, PHLAME, is now published in Cell Reports!! www.cell.com/cell-reports... PHLAME works on tough sample types -- including those with coexisting strains of a species and low depth.

Excited to share new #program, STEPS, which can simulate #dynamics of the E. coli Long-Term Evolution Experiment (#LTEE) or other microbes in serial transfer regime. telliamedrevisited.wordpress.com/2025/08/12/s... STEPS developed by @devinmlake.bsky.social, Zachary Matson, Minako Izutsu, and me.

Environmental adaptations in metagenomes revealed by deep learning bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.... #jcampubs

Do you like coastal/estuarine microbiology, time-series data, and/or metagenomics? Have we got a dataset for you #NSFfunded Metagenomes and 1,313 metagenome-assembled genomes from a northern Gulf of Mexico coastal time series www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Engineering natural microbial communities: harnessing synthetic communities for bioremediation #CurrOpinMicrobiol from Xihui Xu, Nanjing Agricultural University www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I'm excited to announce our new biorxiv preprint, wherein we investigate the evolution of the weirdest genetic locus I've ever seen! Behold the tgr genes of the social amoeba, which mediate self/non-self discrimination during facultative multicellularity 🐅 🧵 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The evolutionary tale of tailocins in Pectobacterium show genus-wide homologous recombination and inversions of tail fiber genes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.30.667677v1

What to expect at the ASM Biofilms Conference

Extremely proud of my postdoc Dr. Elizabeth Knorr for successfully mentoring 5 undergrad research students through several cloning projects this summer!!! Congrats to the mini Knorr Lab! @cmuscience.bsky.social

Kin selection has sparked debate for decades. Now, a landmark study offers a generalised version of Hamilton’s rule, capturing the messy, nonlinear reality of evolution and cooperation. Explained in our latest Insight Article: buff.ly/EKfPBhH #EvoBio #Evolution

Headed home after a fabulous week in RI for the Microbial Adhesion & Signal Transduction GRC. We even had a critical mass of Parsek/Woz alums for a photo!

Here's a fun plasmid from many many years ago I just resurrected. This is p100bp, a ladder-making vector that produces a DNA ladder when cut with EcoRI. I got this from the legendary Open Biotechnology company that sadly went under. Looking forward to testing this and adding to my shop.