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.

Very happy to share that a large part of my thesis work is out today: B. subtilis uses the second messenger c-di-AMP to modulate its turgor pressure in response to the state of its cell envelope. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper in @science.org 👉🏽 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... is accompanied by an especially thoughtful perspective by Carey Nadell and Chris Marx 👉🏽 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Air sampling gives a nice reminder about about how many fungi we are breathing... 🦠🧫

Our new paper out now in Microbiome: Species turnover within #cysticfibrosis lung microbiota is indicative of acute pulmonary exacerbation onset doi.org/10.1186/s401... #CF #microbiomeecology #microbiome

Thanks Liz and all the past and current lab members of David Relman and @blishlab.bsky.social , it's been such a privelege to work with such caring people. Thanks to @lasy.bsky.social @sankaranlab.bsky.social and Claire Donnat for putting together such a nice day of celebrations!!

Check out this brand new fellowship from the Simon’s Foundation in Ecology and Evolution. Incoming grad students this year are eligible to apply. No citizenship restrictions. www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

Off to Milan for #ECFS2025! Looking forward to catching up with fabulous European CF colleagues and being a massive history nerd in Roma with my brother after the conference! 🤓

Do people in the same household share strains when they have the same species? How many cells transmit when a strain is shared? Can strain composition be dynamic when species composition is stable? We answer these and related questions for the facial skin microbiome in our latest paper. 🧵[1/10]

Interesting study shows CsrA forms a dynamic, membraneless compartment with sRNAs, mRNAs & the degradosome in E. coli, flipping its role between activating and repressing virulence. A new layer of RNA-based regulation! #microbiology #RNA #CsrA www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Borrelia burgdorferi also lacks CRISPR and other defense apparatus. Coincidence? “Evolution of a vascular plant pathogen is associated with the loss of CRISPR-Cas and an increase in genome plasticity and virulence genes” Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol... #MicroSky 🦠🧪🧬🧫🔬

As new Editor in Chief of Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, an OA society journal of ISEMPH, we welcome papers at the interface of evolution and medicine. I especially encourage studies in infection biology, broadly construed. We're a great and constructive journal! academic.oup.com/emph

Cystic Fibrosis patients & others living w/ serious health conditions, like cancer, asthma, and blood disorders, rely on social safety-net programs to maintain their health and well-being..large-scale RIFs w/out [due] caution and safeguards would put patients at risk www.cff.org/press-releas...

Our tool SprayNPray to detect contaminating contigs in genome assemblies is a GUI now! Also a bunch of other command line genomic/metagenomic analysis tools on this free web app. Thanks to @midauthorbio.bsky.social for putting this genomic toolbelt together!

Looking forward to the Biofilminar! My lab is going to do a little watch party with pizza. 😎 @cmuscience.bsky.social

Congratulations to CMU Bio undergrad Olivia for getting into her top picks for dental school and to Jot (my lab’s first student 🥲) for successfully defending her honors thesis in the Quantitative Bio & Bioinformatics (QBB) Master’s program!!! Today is a good day. @cmuscience.bsky.social

Check out this latest work by @catarmbruster.bsky.social and Bomberger Lab w/assist from us in mBio. We show that modulator therapy changes evolution of the P aeruginosa populations that persist through therapy. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Persistence and evolution of Pseudomonas aeruginosa following initiation of highly effective modulator therapy in cystic fibrosis #mBiojournal by @catarmbruster.bsky.social et al from Jennifer Bomberger with @vscooper.bsky.social journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

The Armbruster Lab is officially open in the Department of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh! We're studying how bacteria in biofilms persist in the built environment & transition into the host to cause infections. Happy to be here! 🤓

Now in press at Molecular Microbiology!

Rite of passage for micro postdocs transitioning to faculty: replicate a Tn library! Grateful to be wrapping up at the same time as @fabricejpierre.bsky.social (also starting his lab in Jan) so we can compare notes & team up on pipetting. Thanks to Sophie and my labmates for helping, too!