We are hiring @umichmicroimmuno.bsky.social ! Tenure-track assistant professor position in our Microbiology and Immunology department. We are especially looking for someone working in bacterial pathogenesis

🚨Faculty job search: University of Illinois Chicago Micro & Immuno department is hiring! Open rank and open area within host-pathogen interactions. Apply by May 31 to join us in UI College of Medicine in the heart of Chicago! uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Here's the link to the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Looking forward to discussing the story with folks at #SISB2026 this week! 🦠

Bacterial immune proteins have repeatedly evolved to become parts of eukaryotic immunity. But how? Our new preprint uncovers a recent horizontal transfer event & shows how eukaryotes co-opted a toxic bacterial immune protein 🦠🧪🧵 1/

Thank you to @vcallier.bsky.social and Quanta Magazine for highlighting our lab along with the incredible research from @soreklab.bsky.social @audeber.bsky.social @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social @benmorehouse.bsky.social @teralevin.bsky.social @algao.bsky.social Eugene Koonin, L. Aravind and others!

My lab at Pitt is looking for a Research Scientist to help us make phage therapy for patients with antibiotic-resistant infections. Please share and apply! cfopitt.taleo.net/careersectio...

Slaughtering our golden goose: massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Excited to see our work out in Science today! Using machine learning to identify prokaryotic immune systems www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#161502

By all means, if you're deciding, take the time you need. But if you're deciding between two places, and there are three others you've ruled out, let those three know as soon as possible, not once you've picked a school You could make a huge difference to someone else's life

Annual reminder: if you’ve been accepted to multiple graduate programs and are still deciding, please let the ones you’re definitely not going to know as soon as possible! -Someone who got into his PhD off the waitlist the day after the deadline

A must read for anyone who cares (and these days, worries constantly) about American science and medicine. Credit to Prof. Will Mair for sharing his story. There are many more stories like it.

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted. What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards. Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

If you’re in the USA, there’s a whole bunch of “Stand Up For Science” rallies and protests happening this Saturday you could join. Check it out. 👇 And share it around. #uspol #ClimateSky #EnergySky

This March 7th we are rallying for a second time in D.C. and nationwide! Join the fight by visiting standupforscience.net/march7 or fuel the fight for science by visiting standupforscience.net/donate Thank you! #March7 #standupforscience #ImpeachRFKJr #RemoveRFKJr #science

Thank you. The estimate I have heard (from outside NIH sources) is 39% in FY25. And everyone should remember that lowered success rates across many institutes from around 10% to around 5%. Disaster. bsky.app/profile/need...

Download our large database of postdoc fellowships in all fields of research. Database freely available to all; 281 fellowships. Download here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

Excellent story from @aniloza.bsky.social and colleague at STAT on the MOSAIC program. www.statnews.com/2025/12/08/t... 1/4

Brand new preprint from my lab, showing that TnpB, the ancestor of Cas12, acts as a gene drive in plasmids! And it turns out in conjugative plasmids that it acts as a primitive anti-self defense system, providing a potential link between its transposon effect and becoming CRISPR!

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

No words strong enough to express how insane this is.

An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hi everyone, a few years ago, we started a list of labs studying bacterial immunty for students, editors, conference organizers... (currently n=79). Update time ! Send me a message to 1) add your lab or others 2) Correct info docs.google.com/spreadsheets... #Phagesky #Microsky

New Scientist is looking for a new features editor, ideally with a specialism in evolution, ecology, human sciences and biology - if there's you, take a look! www.dmgmedia.co.uk/careers/jobs...

PhD students conduct most of the actual work in generating knowledge on college campuses. Cutting the number of students cuts the amount of research by that amount. A huge divestment from future growth.

This is what happens when governments attack science and academia... we lose the next generation of scholars www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Director Bhattacharya has repeatedly spoken about his commitment to early career scientists. This commitment is not evidence in these data. 10/12

Folks whose jobs, postdocs or grad school fellowships or applications were cut short--drop them a line

Latest from ours: www.cell.com/cell-reports... This is two stories in one: a case study/cautionary tale on developing genetic tools in new organisms, and the first hint at a gene regulatory network for choanoflagellate multicellular development (which turn out to involve a Hippo/YAP/ECM loop!) A 🧵

The #NSF Division of Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS) will host a Virtual Office Hour for the #GRFP (Graduate Research Fellowship Program) on Thursday, October 16 at 1 pm ET: nsf.zoomgov.com/webinar/regi... The deadline for Life Sciences is November 10.

Here's my comment--join me. This would effectively remove foreign PhD students and postdocs from our labs. please share

Heading back from a great visit to Madison! Thank you so much for hosting me, it was wonderful to meet with everyone

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

trait-space maps are cool.

🚨 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...

🚨🎉 The Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine (CEBaM) at Pitt is delighted to announce the winners of this year's Catalyst Award program. This year, Catalysts were designated for science communication projects that engage wider audiences in the field of evolutionary biology and medicine. 🧵🥁

Open tenure track assistant- or associate-level faculty position in the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Vaccine Research. Great science, great facilities, great colleagues - come work with us! jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/674888/f...

Preprint: De-novo design of proteins that inhibit bacterial defenses Our approach allows silencing defense systems of choice. We show how this approach enables programming of “untransformable” bacteria, and how it can enhance phage therapy applications Congrats Jeremy Garb! tinyurl.com/Syttt 🧵

I gave a symposium talk at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 2025 (#eseb2025) meeting last week and this was my title slide showcasing how I was speaking as an independent scientist because @dalhousieu.bsky.social @dalhousie.bsky.social has locked us out.

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

5. It has been centuries since any one human could know everything that is known; understand everything that is understood. This is a remarkable power of science. We delegate trust and authority to experts as internally established in ways that are remarkably resilient to mistakes and malfeasance.

At the same time, we made thousands of synonymous mutations in endogenous yeast genes and measured their growth. We used careful statistics and controls. Only 3%, 204 of 6874, had a fitness effect! This goes against a controversial recent result that most synonymous mutations had fitness effects.

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...

A red algal polysaccharide influences the multicellular development of the choanoflagellate Salpingoeca rosetta CurrentBiology

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...

Great thread, worth a read.

A senior leader at one NIH institute said: “At my level we are legitimately trying to figure out how to keep funding high-impact science given what we expect will happen.” The senior leader added: “Our grants people are barely holding it together because they are at the center of this chaos.”

NEW The White House is blocking the NIH from awarding new research grants for the rest of the fiscal year Chokes off billions in research funding Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol... with @nidhisubs.bsky.social

few outcomes, except for 99% of FDA-approved drugs, 174 recipients of 104 Nobel Prizes, training ~30K MDs and ~10K PhDs per year to enter the workforce, and a 34% reduction in age-adjusted cancer deaths since 1990 -- the largest decrease in history

Exactly, so sad, and so important to get the word out