New on Think Like a Microbe ... Iron! 🧫🧪 #philsci open.substack.com/pub/thinkmic...

How Jane Goodall turned her childhood dream into reality – a sweet illustrated story of purpose and deep determination www.themarginalian.org/2015/01/19/m...

Tonight I learned that one of my heroes has died. I loved her and colleagues' "adventures" as a child and grew up to admire her scientific work for so many reasons. RIP Jane Goodall. Jane Goodall, wildlife advocate and primate expert, dies at 91 - www.reuters.com/business/env...

Silent Spring was published on this day in 1962, catalyzing the environmental movement. The deeply human story behind it: www.themarginalian.org/2017/01/27/r...

I find this reassuring. LLMs don't replace the need to learn how to write whatsoever. There really are no shortcuts to thinking super hard for many hours. That is the only wait to do good science. All shortcuts are an illusion. --> This is good for the humans! Roll your sleeves up and think.

Have you ever looked at some differentially occurring gene clusters in a microbial #pangenome and thought to yourself "I wonder if they contribute to any metabolic modules"? With the most recent changes, the answer is a few clicks away in #anvio 😇

Hydrogen sulfide production distinguishes Salmonella from close relatives, but its biological significance remains obscure. This study uncovers the secret: Salmonella uses hydrogen sulfide production as a weapon to outcompete E. coli and gain a foothold in the gut. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

“Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” Mary Oliver would have been 90 today. Her immortal wisdom on the measure of a life well lived: www.themarginalian.org/2015/02/09/m...

Phew!!! Thank goodness we have a 2025 GRFP announcement!

Reconstructing long-range axons from dense brain images is tough. This study introduces a novel method that separates axon identification from global statistical rules, showing big improvements over existing tools for mapping neuronal projections. buff.ly/OBKr9cM

Redox conduction facilitates direct interspecies electron transport in anaerobic methanotrophic consortia www.science.org/doi/full/10.... #jcampubs

Octopuses sense environmental microbiomes to drive predatory and parental behaviors. Artwork by Lily Soucy. #evolution #sensation #microbiome @cellpress.bsky.social

'Early on in her life, Esther defied societal conventions by pursuing biochemistry, against recommendations from her teachers who believed that a career in science was too difficult for women' academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...

📢 New paper in @nature.com Microbes rock 🎸🤘 with sulfide and iron minerals I am very excited to share our recent study, which describes a previously unknown microbial energy metabolism ⚡⚡⚡🦠🧫⚡⚡⚡ 🆕 Microbial iron oxide respiration coupled to sulfide oxidation - MISO www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Have you ever wondered what increasing environmental stress will do to microbial communities? In our new preprint, @martinadalbello.bsky.social, Jeff Gore and I studied the impact of salinity on microbial community composition and function. 🧵 (1/5) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The final paper from my PhD project is out! Check it out for lots of live recordings of regenerating limbs. We show how we optimized long-term live imaging of regenerating crustacean limbs, up to 10 days, with high temporal resolution. #microscopymonday #regeneration #liveimaging

“To stare into the spiral top of a whelk or cone shell is to see the swirl of the Milky Way.” If you love the intersection of art and science, cultural history and conservation, this lovely read is for you: www.themarginalian.org/2022/07/21/s...

Many spores from the Firmicutes group are decorated with hair-like structures. Since the 60s, they remained a mystery. @remaut-lab.bsky.social named these fibres ENdospore Appendages (ENAs). Using Cryo-ID, we report the identity, structure and function of F-ENA. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very pretty! Loved using similar and such nice looking gassing manifolds when I was a postdoc in the Lovley Lab, back in the day… But, here’s a secret: you can build one with parts from Amazon for way less 💵 that works just as well 👌🏻😉

I was feeling a bit down this Fourth of July but was reminded: “Remember, it’s the birthday of our country and its ideals, not the government or any party.” Happy Independence Day! Cheers to working together for better times ahead 🥂

“We should all be allowed entry into the mysteries of the living world, but people step away from it. They say they found science boring or dull, or it wasn’t their cup of tea, or they’re not good at it. But science is everything.”

Proud to present the lab's latest work. The full structure of the sodium translocating methyltransferase (Mtr) bound to a small oxygen-responsive small protein MtrI. Work by Tristan and together with @schmitzstreitslab.bsky.social . www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.02.657420v1

Deep-sea #hydrothermal plumes support an array of microbial metabolisms, but the fate of organic C is unknown. Here, the authors used metabolic rate assays and metagenomic data to show that heterotrophic bacteria contribute significantly to C cycling in the deep #sea. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

(1/7) Very excited to share my first PhD preprint on the interactions of two of my favorite mobile genetic elements: phages and group II introns! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Betül is fearless.

Impact of tiny anoxic pockets in #Nitrogen loss on sandy shores!! Our newly developed #microfluidic method revealed #microorganisms on sand grains create anoxic microenvironments allowing #denitrification in well-oxygenated sands www.mpi-bremen.de/en/Nitrogen-... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The most alien life we've ever seen is right beneath our feet! Check out this interview with @karenlloyd.bsky.social in @gizmodo.com

An alternative to tSNE & UMAP for more accurate data visualization: Tree representations for distortion-free visualization and exploratory analysis of single-cell omics data. The trees are constructed to accurately represent true distances between the objects in the high-dimensional space.

Very excited this part of my PhD is out 🎉 We describe vent viral and microbial traits that govern viral biogeography and contribute to mounting evidence that these communities are highly endemic, and thus likely vulnerable to disruptive activities like deep sea mining #Microbiome #DeepSeaMining

Happy Earth Day 🌎 ♥️ "Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.” - Rachel Carson

Microbiomes obviously aren't just bacterial. In this new exhaustive review on human-associated Candida albicans, authors focus on its balance between commensalism/pathogenicity and the underlooked asymptomatic association with mucosal surfaces. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I was waiting two years to see this out!! The genomic location of bacterial genes is not random!!! Congratulation on the authors (Martin Lercher and Team!). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Archaea Power Hour is back this Wednesday, April 9th, at 11 AM EST / 4 PM CET, with an exciting lineup of talks!! Check your email for the Zoom link or visit our website (link in bio) for more info on how to join.

This week in @science.org: Multicellularity in archaea when cells are mechanically compressed. 🧪 Read the paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... And the Perspective here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Oxygen gradients shape E. coli motility patterns as they run away from O2! - 😍

Beautiful video of inter-cellular signaling in a swarming response that I pulled from the other place, produced by @strickland-evelyn.bsky.social in collaboration with D. Irimia lab. The dye detects calcium flux that indicates a signal being received by each cell: you're seeing the 'alarm' go out.

Happy to see a large chunk of my PhD work published today in Cell Host&Microbe: www.cell.com/cell-host-mi... We conducted fluorescence-activated single-cell sorting of active predatory protists in the ocean and recovered symbionts with cool evolutionary positions close to animal pathogens.

Great new paper by @mjwilkins.bsky.social and @kcwrighton.bsky.social labs on wetland methane cycling. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧪🔬🦠🧫Wow. This is one of the most exciting papers I've read... in my recent life! I wonder when I'll get to hear/see @flamholz.bsky.social explain it to a general public! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

🌟 Exciting news! Our latest collaborative research with team @aarhusuni.bsky.social introduces pH-FISH, a novel technique combining pH ratiometry and FISH to simultaneously unravel microbial identity and local biofilm pH. 🔬 🧪 #MicroSky link.springer.com/article/10.1... #Microbiome #Biofilms

New collaborative mini-review with the Soil Stars (thesoilstars.com/) and friends - Soil microbiome interventions for carbon sequestration and climate mitigation journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

Really proud of this one. Nothing speaks more true to my sentiments on the value of open source and accessible hardware. Hoping it can be a guide for fellow researchers. Look out for my next collab with @sarraceniamason.bsky.social, hopefully this coming year! pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Science is not really happening when the goal is a paper, a presentation, a grant, or any product. It only really happens when the goal is a process of discovery.

Rachel Carson on cultivating a "sense of wonder so indestructible" that it acts as "an unfailing antidote against… the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength"

Another take on #deepseamining theconversation.com/deep-seabed-...

To honour Alice Catherine Evans for her studies of the bacteriology of milk and cheese and proving the risk of consumption of raw milk DSMZ researchers named the strain Streptomyces evansiae (DSM 41979) after her. #herstory #WomenInScience #pasteurisation #actinomycetes #microbiology #brucellosis

This keeps coming up, and I think there is ambiguity in the field that is really not helpful. So to be clear, based on my knowledge and experience in microbiome research, I am confident that there is no such thing as a "brain microbiome" www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle... 1/2

Physiology, the functioning of a cell at a given time and in a given set of physiochemical conditions, is an emergent property that cannot be reliably predicted from genomic data or metabolic reconstructions alone. #testthy(metagenomic)hypotheses

🥁 New Publication Alert: Our manuscript on the ☕️ and #microbiome relationship is out in #NatureMicrobiology: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/12