I don’t know who needs to hear this but the CDC is being eviscerated right now. America is not going to have any kind of outbreak response capacity after tonight. Americans’ health data is no longer secure. Say goodbye to federal public health in any capacity. It’s a disaster. We won’t recover.

Very cool. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy to share this new article online at #mSphere journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... Human nasal organoids (HNOs) are a new model system for studying bacterial colonization and interspecies interactions. A big congratulations to the whole team, especially co-first authors: Andrea Boyd and Leah Kafer

The center’s Chief Scientific Officer David Perlin, PhD, provides some insights on the evolution of their antiviral program from its foundation in treating COVID-19 to addressing all pancoronaviruses. #IDsky #Medsky

Phosphate sensing by PhoPR regulates the cytotoxicity of Staphylococcus aureus. Published Open Access and fee-free in Microbiology using a Publish and Read agreement: doi.org/10.1099/mic.... #MicrobioJ #PublishAndRead

The NIH ordered me to stop my ‘dangerous’ gain-of-function research. It isn’t dangerous at all www.statnews.com/2025/10/06/g... via @statnews.com

#Listeria monocytogenes causes serious infections by invading cells and crossing intestinal, blood–brain, and placental barriers, leading to #bacteraemia, CNS, and maternal–neonatal complications https://www.nature.c...

Identification of genetic interactions in Bacillus subtilis cell division. Congratulations, Byoung-Mo Koo, Carol Gross, and all involved! @cp-cellsystems.bsky.social #subtiwiki www.cell.com/cell-systems...

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

This is pretty amazing. Aside from everything else, can finally start to scratch the surface of understanding compensatory pathways/redundancy in bacteria

When I was at NIH and shutdowns loomed, it was discovered that the administration was planning to shut down PubMed. The head of NCBI called the powers that be and pointed out that this would threaten patient safety Who knows what will happen now Just in case, remember Euruope-PMC (europepmc.org )

This may just be paranoia on my part, but I have learned not to discount those feelings over the past 8 months. Always good to be prepared in any case.

Very happy to share some more good news. Our collaboration with Jeffrey Boyd's lab is now published at J Inorganic Biochemistry! Here, Jeff found that iron limitation reprograms S. aureus metabolism towards fermentation. We're grateful to be part of this study. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Horizon Europe has launched a €253M AMR partnership to accelerate innovation and move potential therapies closer to market. The first funding call, focused on treatments, will open in November following a pre-announcement in mid-October. sciencebusiness.net/news/r-d-fun...

Now published! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Very nice collaboration with Hoogenboom ( @ucl.ac.uk ) and Bonev ( @uniofnottingham.bsky.social ) labs.

To summarise our recent pre-print: Autocycler, the automated consensus assembler, when used with Nanopore long-read only Enterobacterales assemblies, produces more complete chromosomes and plasmids, with an accuracy comparable to hybrid assemblies.

Happy to share that the paper describing Autocycler is now 100% up: doi.org/10.1093/bioi... (1/3)

Pleased to share the new article from UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy PharmD/PhD student Daniel Sun focused on repurposing FDA-approved agents to inhibit virulence, restore antibiotic susceptibility, bolster host defenses, and modulate inflammation v. S. aureus www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Evolution under vancomycin selection drives divergent collateral sensitivity patterns in Staphylococcus aureus

New in JB: Ma, Wang & Li review the role of DNA methylation in regulating pathogenesis, drug resistance, biofilm formation, adhesion, and motility and more! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @asm.org #JBacteriology

Apple's approach to protein structure is great for accessibility - & potentially biological realism - reasons. Eg, prediction could be achieved w/ smaller compute & the generative nature of prediction allows for multiple conformations A summary here: genomely.substack.com/p/simplefold...

Excited to annouce the latest research published by our lab, which is led by Dinesh Subedi and is out today in Nature Microbiology. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Immunization with peptides can elicit antigen-specific T cell responses, but they're not widely used because they are poorly immunogenic and are rapidly cleared. Domenico D'Atri solves this by using our "SSHEL" platform (synthetic bacterial spores) . journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Ever wondered how to position organelles in bacteria? Wonder no more! Happy to have contributed to this fantastic story from @cellforganized.bsky.social' lab. The avenues this opens in the synthetic biology space are enormous! Movie: Carboxysomes positioned in E. coli! Preprint: shorturl.at/D6xVg

A correlation that vanishes once familial confounding is accounted for: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

New blog post! metaMDBG (@gaetanbenoit.bsky.social) and Myloasm (@jimshaw.bsky.social) have had recent releases, so I updated the benchmarks from the Autocycler paper: rrwick.github.io/2025/09/23/a... Both tools improved considerably! Time to update your conda environments 😄

Q: “You said that there is no reason to give newborn babies hepatitis B vaccines, but hepatitis B can be contracted, not just during sexually transmitted diseases…So when you say, 'You feel,' is that appropriate to just be telling the public?” Trump: “I think it's absolutely appropriate.”

"The Hepatitis B vaccine has nearly eliminated maternal transmission of the disease in the United States, slashing the incidence to fewer than 20 cases a year from about 20,000 a year before 1991..." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/h...

#NewResearch Nasal colonisation by S. aureus is linked with depression in a human cohort and shown in a mouse model to cause decreased serotonin and dopamine in the brain #MicroSky #Depression www.nature.com/articles/s41...

academic.oup.com/bioinformati... The successor to Trycycler. Another great piece of kit from @rrwick.bsky.social github.com/rrwick/Autoc...

"My thoughts turned to David Rose, who volunteered to try to prevent another such attack on our country, and then, when back home, ran toward danger once again to help his fellow Americans." www.thebulwark.com/p/a-hero-dav...

NEW: Hours before a new entry ban is supposed to go into effect, the federal government officially acknowledges for the first time that the restrictions do NOT apply to people who currently have H-1B visas. Link: www.uscis.gov/sites/defaul...

Dr. Eloise Williams explains how her team used genomics & clinical data to narrow 5,881 Neisseria gonorrhoeae isolates to 5 safer, real-world candidates for an oropharyngeal CHIM. #IDsky #MEDsky Read our Q&A & her insights here: www.contagionlive.com/view/five-ne...

So excited to share a new paper from my lab just published in Nature Communications! We showed that vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) occupied distinct intestinal niches in the antibiotic-treated intestine. doi.org/10.1038/s414... Amazing work by first author Olivia King and colleagues!

Really excited to share my first paper from the Whitney lab, alongside an amazing grad student, Polina. Here we identify a chaperone family required for the folding of a central domain of T7SS toxins, and solve the structure of the chaperone-toxin complex. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

⚠️ New publication ⚠️ here we explore how daptomycin interacts with bacterial membranes, demonstrating that calcium ions and lipid composition play a crucial role in modulating its activity. Using a stable analogue (1/3) #MicroSky doi.org/10.1016/j.bb...

🚨Job alert!🚨 We are looking for a new lab manager to join our group at the University of Oregon! Applicants with experience in microbiology, evolutionary genetics, or protein biochemistry are especially encouraged to apply. See the link below for more information: barberlab.org/contact/

🧵 Our study on the elusive titration control mechanism of the replication initiator DnaA in Escherichia coli is now out on @natcomms.nature.com‬! @stephkoe.bsky.social @hohlbeinlab.bsky.social‬ @nicoc-micsynmet.bsky.social @ettema.bsky.social‬ @mib-wur.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Inactivation of peptidoglycan remodeling promotes antibiotic susceptibility in vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.11.675460v1

👉 Analysis of essential genes in Clostridioides difficile by CRISPRi and Tn-seq! 👇 | Journal of Bacteriology journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @jbacteria.bsky.social

Postdoc position available - pls share- to investigate molecular mechanisms of protein homeostasis during S. during infection. Send a CV, list of publications, and a statement about why you would like to join the laboratory. Eduardo Groisman Yale Med [email protected]

Sugar phosphate-mediated inhibition of peptidoglycan precursor synthesis | mBio journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... #microsky

Has anyone encountered DNA fragments that were hard to clone because “toxic” in E. coli? (Not because of expression). Any tools to detect that? #microsky

A new vaccine strategy targeting a specific surface loop on the MntC protein of Staphylococcus aureus shows promise in overcoming previous challenges in protecting against drug-resistant strains. doi.org/g9ztn5

Don’t trust the experts”? That’s not democracy, that’s recklessness. On a plane, I want a pilot. In a hospital, I want doctors and scientists who understand the evidence. Expertise isn’t religion or authoritarianism — it’s training, accountability, and data. Ignore it and we all pay the price.