Looking for a POSTDOC to work on jumbo phages (those with large genomes and fascinating cell biology), using our latest ASO technology (Gerovac M et al. 2025 Nature) to define RNA export mechanisms as well as to help to advance phage therapy. Here's the job ad.

What is better than one? Two connected papers! #NewResearch S protein of Streptococcus pneumoniae activates PBP1a and coordinates with a wider GpsB-associated multi-protein complex to regulate peptidoglycan remodelling and cell division. #MicroSky 🦠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#NewResearch S protein from Streptococcus pneumoniae activates cell wall repair and modification to promote virulence against in vivo antimicrobial pressures including lysozyme and LL-37 @veeninglab.com #MicroSky 🦠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📰 News Recherche L’équipe @veeninglab.com @dmf-unil.bsky.social @unil.bsky.social a mis en évidence chez le streptocoque le rôle central de la protéine S dans l’arsenal de défense de cette bactérie qui peut se révéler très pathogène. ➡️ www.unil.ch/news/fr/1761...

cellwall·abys & pneumo fans take note 👇 #MicroSky

Now online @natmicrobiol.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm not sure what to think about this. Most top open access journals cost more than CHF 3,500 to publish so will not be covered by SNSF funding. It will make it even more difficult for small universities to publish in top journals because of budget limitations.

Coupled to the general budget cuts by both the canton and federal government to our University (and it's happening at most institutes in Switzerland), this would be really bad. The project funding scheme is really the best thing about Swiss science, so please don't touch this!

🧵Enterococcus faecalis is not just an extracellular organism. 🧵 A growing body of work shows it can survive + REPLICATE inside host cells, and that intracellular life may seed persistence, dissemination, and reinfection. 1/n #MMBR @asm.org journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Very pleased to share that our recent article with @veeninglab.com in @natcomms.nature.com was selected for the Editor's Highlights, which aims to showcase the 50 best papers recently published in the area of #microbiology & infectious diseases! www.nature.com/collections/...

New preprint! 🐝 We engineered a bacterial biosensor to reveal micron-scale arabinose gradients in the honeybee gut. Congratulations to Audam and all co-authors. Great collaboration with @pengellab.bsky.social as part of the NCCR Microbiomes at @fbm-unil.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are looking forward to sunnier days and some fantastic presentations at our #ProkaryoticCellBio meeting in Portugal next July! Grants, Early Bird pricing and Talk slots close on 12 Jan, register & submit today to join us! 🌞 👉https://bit.ly/48G29dP

I just published: ERC-Plus: jackpot science or missed chance to fix academia? My reflections on ERC-Plus, Europe’s newest ultra-competitive research grant and what it tells us about the academic culture we’re building. medium.com/p/erc-plus-j...

Cool work from Heath Murray's lab where they use Cas9 nickase to study how ssDNA breaks are repaired in Bacillus subtilis #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New Publication! In this collaboration with @veeninglab.com at the @unil.bsky.social, we used multi-omics to examine the response of Streptococcus pneumoniae to infection-mimicking growth conditions, discovering a novel regulator of membrane fatty acid composition. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The hinge bypass gate paper is finally out! doi.org/10.1038/s414... We show how loop-extruding SMC complexes can maintain DNA entrapment while bypassing obstacles on DNA — including transcription machinery & potentially other SMCs. A lucky convergence of 3 projects lead to the initial discovery!

Really cool paper from @vincentdebakker.bsky.social @jonbakerlab.bsky.social now published @natcomms.nature.com #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨Preprint alert - this is a big one! We transfer the revolutionary power of TnSeq to bacteriophages. Our HIDEN-SEQ links the "dark matter" genes of your favorite phage to any selectable phenotype, guiding the path from fun observations to molecular mechanisms. A thread 1/8

First the link to the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚀New preprint from our lab! I am very excited to finally share what has been the main focus of my PhD for the past almost 3 years! It is about viral dark matter and a powerful tool we built to shed light on it. 🧬💡 Continue reading (🧵)

Bacterial networks #BacNet26 in September 2026 will be chaired by @lalouxlab.bsky.social and co-chaired by @s-lab.bsky.social with @coralietesseur.bsky.social Sneak peak on invited speakers and preliminary program: meetings.embo.org/event/26-bac...

Cool paper from @smitslab.bsky.social Structural insights into how PolC-inhibitors work and can open up the road to a new suite of antibiotics www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now online! journals.plos.org/plospathogen... #MicroSky

This was a fun collaboration between Ophélie & the @seegerlab.bsky.social using sybody libraries to target the SMC complex in living bacteria. With a suprising finding: the 14 isolated sybodies bind to the middle of the SMC coiled coil rather than the more conserved ATPase heads.

Sign up for our annual Impromptu Symposium on Nov. 21 in the Biophore @unil.bsky.social organized by Christophe Keel and Jordan Vacheron, which will explore the fascinating world of microbe–plant interactions with an exciting speaker line up! Registration (lunch included): forms.gle/t4fC8uQV5HQF...

News article in English: www.unil.ch/news/en/1760...

The @nccr-antiresist.bsky.social PhD fellowship call is now open! Apply now (deadline 15 January) for a unique PhD Fellowship in Antibiotic Discovery. Our lab will also offer a project that a selected candidate can choose! www.nccr-antiresist.ch/join-us/

💉 News recherche Des microbiologistes de @unil.bsky.social ont développé une technologie qui ouvre la voie à de nouveaux vaccins contre des maladies pour lesquelles il n’existe encore aucune protection. www.unil.ch/news/fr/1759...

Independent research fellowships leading to tenured positions at the John Innes Centre. Repost = nice. Thank you very much!!!

Amazing work by @hueihsuantsai.bsky.social and colleagues from @nikogeldner.bsky.social, Feng Zhou @tonnigrubeandersen.bsky.social labs in Science Localized glutamine leakage drives the spatial structure of root microbial colonization www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #chemotaxis #MicroSky

Finally out, such an awesome piece of work, very proud of this one: www.cell.com/cell-systems... #MicroSky

Identification of optimal fluorophores for use in the Drosophila embryo by Timothy E Saunders and team: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It is not only antibiotics but also certain viruses – known as bacteriophages – that can kill off pathogenic bacteria. However, Switzerland lacks the legal framework for the use of these viruses in therapy. What would need to change? Researcher Alexander Harms explains. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

Nice work on tackling genetic interactions in the pneumococcus! If you like this, you will also like our work doing the same thing using dual CRISPRi. Coming soon in @cp-cellsystems.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🎓 Today, I successfully defended my PhD! It’s been a long journey and I’m incredibly grateful for all the support, lessons, and growth along the way. A huge thank you to my committee members — Nina Khanna, Dirk Bumann, @veeninglab.com , and @mkjos.bsky.social — for their guidance and encouragement.

Looking for a new approach to studying or eliminating phages? Check out our study introducing anti-phage ASOs (antisense oligos) out in @Nature today. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Deciphering microbial spatial organization: insights from synthetic and engineered communities url: academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

It's finally here: PneumoWiki! A great complement to PneumoBrowse 2.0. Essential tools for pneumococcal research, congrats to the Greifswald team! #MicroSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cool work by @mkjos.bsky.social Daniel Straume showing that the competence-induced peptidoglycan hydrolase LytF promotes pilus extrusion, thereby enhancing the efficiency of DNA uptake in S, sanguinis. Is this also a major function of the pneumococcal CbpD fratricide? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Insanity! 🐜❤️‍🔥👇🏻

Cool preprint by Mathieu Berge @polardlab.bsky.social showing that the Spr1630 toxin (RipA) toxin targets the replication sliding-clamp (DnaN) and that this induces competence in Streptococcus pneumoniae. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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 🧵

🚨 Imagine a bacterium that refuses to follow the textbook: It grows as tangled filaments, divides unevenly, reshapes its own membranes… and even builds grappling hooks. Meet Litorilinea aerophila — and here’s why it blew our minds.

Our website had a small update. BlueSky feed is now integrated. If you want to know how to do this, you can reach out to website guru Doran Pauka (under contact on our site) veeninglab.com

Tour de force paper by Jingren Zhang's group @tsinghuauniversity.bsky.social showing a complex link between peptidoglycan acetylation and phase variation through nutrient sensing #MicroSky journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

New tools for the important opportunistic human bacterial pathogen Haemophilus influenzae #MicroSky: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🌱 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗚𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗽 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗶𝗹 𝗕𝗶𝗼𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 🥬 Are you based in Switzerland and passionate about the #environment, science, or gardening? Join a unique citizen science experiment starting this September, led by researchers of the #NCCRMicrobiomes @snsf.ch. ➡️ nccr-microbiomes.ch/outreach/the...

📢 Nouvelle étude du @veeninglab.com au @dmf-unil.bsky.social @unil.bsky.social, menée par la Dre @bevikas.bsky.social et publiée dans @natcomms.nature.com : des pistes prometteuses pour traiter les #infections à pneumocoques résistantes aux #antibiotiques 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Research is under pressure worldwide. But science still thrives ✊ Join us @dmf-unil.bsky.social – great colleagues, great science, and thus far reasonable government and funding agencies. Still time to apply! 🤞

Now published, congrats Bevika, Kinki, Vincent, Florian and Paddy! #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...