📣 Abstract submission deadline for CSHL TEs extended to July 24! Two more weeks to submit your abstract for a short talk or poster — do it! It’s gonna be a fantastic meeting!! meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

Our paper out in Science today: The Metis defense system senses molecular byproducts released when a phage degrades the bacterial genome, and then prevents replication of the phage in the infected cell Congratulations @ostermanilya.bsky.social and co-authors!

www.cell.com/molecular-ce... I'm happy to see our work published! If you are interested in transposons, transcriptional regulation and Pol III come and check it out 👀 🧫 🧬

Molecular medicine in Berlin. Exchanges with NYU and the Weizmann Institute. Max Delbrück Center: cardiovascular, cancer, neuro, immunology, systems biology. Your PhD. Your city. Your move. Symposium Sept 10 → doctoralinsights.at #DocInsights #MDC

Our evil ORFeome paper is out! In collaboration with @alex-stark.bsky.social, we screened ~4,000 viral proteins and secreted effectors from bacteria and parasites, covering hundreds of diverse pathogens, for phenotypes in human cells.

Very excited for our new paper, now out in @cellcellpress.bsky.social! /🧵 The protein Tau forms intracellular toxic tangles in neurons in Alzheimer’s disease and Tauopathies. Tau pathology slowly spreads from cell-to-cell but the mechanisms are not clear /1 authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

a small attempt to capture this enormous loss and what Greg meant and means to so many. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Our work is out now! (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). We discover a selective autophagy pathway that protects plants from the mess caused by RNA viruses. Intrigued? Follow the spaghetti trail for a summary of our findings🧵-->

📣 POSTDOC position available in the Feschotte Lab at Cornell to work on #TRANSPOSONS! More details below. Pls send informal application or inquiry ASAP by DM or email to cf458_at_cornell.edu. Pls spread the word 🙏 #TEsky www.thefeschottelabatcornell.com

🚨After 4 fantastic years in the Sorek lab @soreklab.bsky.social, I’ll be starting my own group at EMBL @embl.org bl.org Hamburg. www.embl.org/groups/oster... Metabolism-driven immunity: phages, metabolites, and discovery of new enzymes, molecules, and pathways 🦠🧬

With hantavirus, Ebola and meningitis making recent headlines, here's an interactive timeline to explore devastating infections throughout history and the scientific and medical advances to fight and prevent them. www.superbugs.online/timeline 🦠 🧫 🔬 💊 🏥

How do sperm and egg fuse? Surprisingly, we still don’t fully know… Our field has uncovered many pieces of the fertilization puzzle, but not how they fit together. We identify ✨ SPARK ✨ - a conserved sperm complex that couples sperm-egg binding to fusion. tinyurl.com/34cm4xat Read on! 🧵👇

Host-transposable element coexistence: a matter of resistance, tolerance and trade-off Read this new review by Séverine Chambeyron, Charlotte Grimaud, Mikiko Siomi et al link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🧬 New research from the Burga lab! We took a closer look at a rogue selfish protein and caught evolution in the act of turning something old into something radically new 💡 (a.k.a. neofunctionalization) @imbavienna.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Curious? Here’s a breakdown:

👋 Transposon lovers: registration is now open for the CSHL TE meeting! We have a 🔥 lineup of invited speakers and many slots for short talks selected upon abstract across all areas of TE biology. 🧬➰🧬 #TEsky Abstract deadline: July 10 meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR. We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets. Thread + link below.

🎉Excited to share our new preprint! TIR domains from diverse animals, including human TLR4, are catalytically active and produce cyclic ADP-ribose (cADPR). This enzymatic activity is widespread in animals and conserved across the tree of life. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Over two billion years, a fierce battle has raged between bacteria and the viruses that infect them. The resulting evolution has shaped the way our bodies fight disease today. @vcallier.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/the-ancient-...

Love Drosophila genetics — this journal club was a great way to share that enthusiasm and pay tribute to the pioneers of transposons regulation 🪰 How classical genetics uncovered key determinants of TE silencing #transposon @igred.fr @igred.fr 👇👇

Germ cells have their own versions of core transcription factors and fertility depends on them. We're hiring a PhD student to figure out how! 📢 Fly genetics + proteomics + genomics. Fully funded. Aarhus University 🇩🇰 Deadline May 1 👇 Please share with anyone who might be interested!

Our current understanding of the Metis defense system - carved in wood By @naamalila.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How diverse is bacterial immunity ? We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems. 👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie... Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

This paper started as an idea @albertomarina.bsky.social had many years ago… which of course means he was right all along 😄. Some of us just needed a few years (and a lot of experiments) to catch up. Grateful (and slightly humbled) to be part of this. Thanks Alberto! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Securing two group leader positions at the same institute is no small feat.  From IMP postdocs to group leaders: Laura Lorenzo-Orts and Ulrich Hohmann started their labs at IMB Mainz this year:

Join us for a day of talks, posters, and discussions, featuring a morning joint lecture with Nobel Laureates Eric F. Wieschaus and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard! Date: Monday, May 4th, 2026 Location: University of Copenhagen, Mærsk Tower sites.google.com/view/emergin... Free to participate

The demystification of piRNA clusters if you wonder how cells generate piRNAs specifically against transposons & you are looking for a weekend read check out @86dominik.bsky.social's opus magna (or Dominik's great thread) a shared project with the one and only Rippei Hayashi, lab alumnus & friend

How does the piRNA pathway solve the self vs. non-self problem? 🧬 Since piRNAs come from single-stranded RNA, how does the cell choose the right ones? For years, "piRNA clusters" were seen as THE privileged source. But are they really special and earmarked for biogenesis? (1/19)

Check out our new paper in early access at Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The (Yoav) Voichek lab has opened its gates at the Weizmann Institute, and is actively recruiting students and researchers at all levels - come explore gene regulation and computational genomics in a fun, friendly sprouting lab 🤗🥼⚗️🧪 www.weizmann.ac.il/plants/voichek

Intrigued by a long-standing conundrum in small RNA biology—how nuclear Argonaute proteins silence transposons when they *need* target transcription for their own recruitment—we studied the piRNA pathway. And found a hidden RNA-decay axis from Piwi to the RNA exosome.

Lastly, I’m excited to join @imbmainz.bsky.social in 2026 to start my own lab. We'll explore new mechanisms in eukaryotic gene expression, leveraging ‘evolutionary play’ to uncover how regulation, repurposing, and hijacking shape RNA biology. tinyurl.com/y4x29ctt Thanks for reading! 20/20

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on. (Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

Some impressions from the rather fabulous #EMBOmobilegenome Mobile Genome meeting in Heidelberg Morning walk through the woods, exciting panel discussion, flash talks, lab community, drosophila friends, … @events.embl.org The transposon community is going very strong. see you all again in 2027!!

When transposons jump, genomes diverge - even in cultured cells. I am happy to share our new preprint: a chromosome-scale genome assembly for Drosophila OSC cells, one of the key model systems in the piRNA field, especially for nuclear piRNA biology. 🧬🧵 (1/12)

1/ How do animals develop immunity against a newly encountered transposable element from scratch? Our study reveals that the mobility of TEs is their Achilles heel, allowing hosts to develop a powerful small RNA-mediated silencing response. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We wrote a review on the free nucleotide pool as a central playground in human, bacterial, and plant immunity – now out in Nature Reviews in Immunology www.nature.com/articles/s41... Was fun to write this piece with Dina Hochhauser! Here is a thread to explain the premises 1/

We wrote a review on Transposable Elements (TEs) and almost all aspects of TE silencing and their roles in biological processes & disease. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Although we didn't make it to a cover, it was so wonderful to work with @mariadiazillus.bsky.social on designing an artwork inspired by our work. Thank you Maria! We love it and will be proudly showing it around. Rover ERV wandering around the chromatin rapped around the moons of the solar system:

🚨📢 New paper alert! A study led by Kirsten Senti and Julius Brennecke offers new insights into how ancient endogenous retroviruses diversified to exploit different cell “niches” in the fruit fly ovary, and how the host’s defenses adapted in return. https://imba.science/Brennecke_EMBOJ

REFEREE 1: “I conclude with a simple, direct statement - this is the best paper I have read all year!” #TransparentPeerReview Co-evolving infectivity and expression patterns drive the diversification of endogenous retroviruses @juliusbrennecke.bsky.social et al www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Flybase lost all of the NIH support overnight - it is a disaster for the community. Please consider donating. I just did! www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

Happy #FluorescenceFriday !🌈 Today, sperm cells & developing gametes (Dapi, 🟢🟡🟠🔴) and testis muscles (Phalloidin (🔵🟢) in/on a #Drosophila non-melanogaster (guess the species and you’re the 🐐) #cellbio #devbio #science #sciart #microscopy Scope: Zeiss Airyscan 980❤️@zeiss-microscopy.bsky.social

📣 Our new VIP3 Postdoc program is accepting applications! Wondering what's it's like to do a postdoc at the Vienna Biocenter? Find out here👇 🎉

#drosophila @flybase.bsky.social request emergency funding: "As it stands, by the end of July, 2025, there will be no future updates to FlyBase, and in the worst case scenario access to the website will also be lost" => please donate! www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

Did you know? 🧪 "The Interactive Fly" is a wonderful website hosted by @socdevbio.bsky.social where you can learn about their development, the history of gene discovery/name, and it is full of super useful resources for the #DevBio community 🪰https://www.sdbonline.org/sites/fly/aimain/1aahome.htm

Blurring the lines between retrotransposons & viruses! sORF2 enables direct transmission of retrotransposons challenging our understanding of mobile genetic elements. #preprint @juliusbrennecke.bsky.social Lab #preLight from Ally Simpson & Alyss Humphrey! 👉 prelights.biologists.com/highlights/d...

Stop for a second and try to imagine this: a heat shock protein relocalizes to the cell surface and mediates dsRNA binding and internalization! Intrigued? Read our newly minted paper in Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Congrats to all the authors and thanks to reviewers and editor!

We are hiring! Join the BioOptics team as a Data Scientist in Image Analysis and contribute to the team’s mission of providing microscopy applications, flow cytometry, and image analysis services. Link below. #europe #research #lifesciences

Online now at @cp-cell.bsky.social , the culmination of a 12-year effort. 🧵 to follow later this evening www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

💥🥳 At long last, our latest paper is out! Gag proteins of endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Led heroically by Sylvia Chang & @jonowells.bsky.social A study which has changed the way I think of #transposons! No less! 🧵 1/n