I’m extremely happy that Taylor Devlin was awarded a Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions postdoctoral fellowship to work with us on the biophysical properties of bacterial adhesion to host factors! Great job Taylor! marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/news/msca-aw...

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

Martin Peterson doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Ending the year with a new preprint out from our lab. We show that Type 4 Secretion Systems in Gram-positive bacteria use pili in conjugation. For a full recap, check out the thread from the lead author @josyterbeek.bsky.social here below ⬇️ Hope y’all get a nice end to 2025!

It burns. It burns. My eyes.

Any climate researchers I know that can corroborate this article? Is this really where we’re going right now? worldcrunch.com/focus/green-...

Seems the Nordic region is doing quite good... Did I mention we will announce a new postdoc position within a month or two? :)

This is on several levels pretty amazing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Vaccines do not cause autism. We know that the predominant cause of autism is genetics. It is deeply concerning that the CDC is promoting an idea that has been debunked countless times. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Today I’m starting a new position as Professor in Molecular Medicine at Umeå University I’m happy and proud, but also extremely thankful to all people in the group, both current and past members!

Skrattade högt.

Please RT. Post-doc opportunity alert! 💥 closing 10th December.. Come join our team (www.thelowlab.org) at Imperial, London, working on the structure and mechanism of bacterial secretion systems. For more details and to apply please see www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

I love AlphaFold—but please include PAE (Predicted Aligned Error) plots for every “interaction.” Pretty PDBs ≠ proof. If the PAE doesn’t show an interface, it ain’t one. Show the plots. Structural biology's reputation is on the line.

This is really cool! If you want to get a card game that explains microorganisms - now's your chance! www.umu.se/en/news/rese...

Seems like a very handy tool!

Visit PDB-101 to learn more about Antimicrobial Resistance

Exciting to see our protein binder design pipeline BindCraft published in its final form in @Nature ! This has been an amazing collaborative effort with Lennart, Christian, @sokrypton.org, Bruno and many other amazing lab members and collaborators. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Archaea are often surrounded by bacteria. But is there ever active conflict between the two? Can archaea kill bacteria? If so, how do they do it? Work by @romainstrock.bsky.social shows that some archaea can kill bacteria by secreting peptidoglycan hydrolases. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Interesting that they could put a number on it. And yes, that's a reindeer seeking shade behind a concrete wall. Not their usual place to hang out...

Cryo-EM ligand building using AlphaFold3-like model and molecular dynamics pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40788932/ #cryoem

Here's our new broad review on the extended mobility of plasmids, about all mechanisms driving and limiting their transfer. From conjugation to conduction, phage-plasmids to hitchers, molecular to evolutionary dynamics, ecology to biotech. The state of affairs. 1/9 academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

💥 Excited to introduce Bacformer 🦠 - the first foundation model for bacterial genomics. Bacformer represents genomes as sequences of ordered proteins, learning the “grammar” of how genes are arranged, interact and evolve. Preprint 📝: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 1/n

😳😱 not a smart move…🧬🧶

I'm today starting as pro-dean at the medical faculty at @umeauniversitet.bsky.social. Looking forward to exciting years ahead, together with the new dean Katrine Riklund and the others in the faculty leadership!

Finally! ERC is reducing the length of part II of their application form. 'The length of this section is now limited to seven pages for Starting, Consolidator, and Advanced Grant applications and ten pages for Synergy Grant applications'

Alltid lika spännande att se vilka som blir nya ledamöter i @sverigesungaakademi.se! Är lite extra glad över att se att vi får en ny lokal ledamot, då @laurabacete.bsky.social från Umeå @umeaplantsciencecentre.se / @umeauniversitet.bsky.social är invald 🙂 sverigesungaakademi.se/pressmeddela...

Bra tråd om man är intresserad av skog!

"Science is an investment. We will put forward a new 500 million package for 2025-2027 to support the best and the brightest researchers and scientists from Europe and around the world." — President @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu at the ‘Choose Europe for Science' event at La Sorbonne 🇫🇷

What can one say.. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Only 5 more days left to apply. Take the chance and join us trying to understand the molecular mechanisms of conjugation, in beautiful Umeå, Sweden. We are extremely well equipped, and are looking for an enthusiastic person to join our team! 😀

This is cool stuff, will be interesting to try out!

These gender studies lectures are just writing themselves

HULK ADAM SMASHES DIRE WOLVES. Man alive this vexes me, and I am a bit sweary and irritable in this. Enjoy. arutherford.substack.com/p/dire-wolve...

Maybe not completely research related, but if you do apply and end up getting the position, you can look forward to great displays of northern lights, like this one yesterday (taken from my yard with my cell phone camera..)

If having a negative personal opinion of the policies that are now severely affecting researchers in the US is grounds for not being let in the country, it seems like I'll be skipping any US conferences the coming years... www-lemonde-fr.translate.goog/internationa...

Well written!

🚨This week, many Columbia scientists lost grants that funded over half their annual income. Others will no longer be able to do research that helps treat thousands of sick patients across the US. "It hurts," they told me. My story for @nature.com 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

We are looking for a postdoc! Join us to work in an exciting integrated structural biology project, focusing on understanding how Type 4 Secretion System facilitate horizontal gene transfer in bacteria! Please share! www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n

A bizarre new development that even further decreases academic freedom in the US! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Ukraine is Europe! We stand by Ukraine. We will step up our support to Ukraine so that they can continue to fight back the agressor. Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.

Current policy in the US is bad for science in the US, but also globally, on a whole multitude of levels. Even if one politically wants to decrease national funding on research, then this is clearly not the smart way of going about doing that. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Another beautiful morning in Umeå! Sun is shining, we have a crisp -10°C, snow everywhere. Just perfect 😍❄️☀️

Come join us here in the north! Remarkably good research climate, infrastructure and colleagues. Further, the Swedish government is doing a reasonably good job of putting money into research funding instead of cutting it as is happening in some other places!

We are incredibly happy for @endymiomatic.bsky.social who managed to secure a Marie Curie Sklodowska Actions postdoc grant for further work in our group! Congrats Kieran!

Sveriges unga akademi lanserar Forskningsfyren - pris för forskningskommunikation. Känner ni någon yngre forskare som har gjort bra insatser för att kommunicera forskning så håll koll på detta, det är möjligt att nominera från 10 februari! sverigesungaakademi.se/pressmeddela...

Foldseek-Multimer—now published in @naturemethods.bsky.social—our fast multimer search tool, enables complex comparisons against the full PDB in seconds. It comes with BFMD, a collection of 300K+ predictions gathered from community projects. 📄 nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐 search.foldseek.com

europepmc.org is the European (and better) version of Pubmed if the latter goes down due to fragile state reasons.

This will probably generate some backlash since there are important environmental, commensal, and pathogenic species in each group, but Gram-positive bacteria are just more talented, rather more charismatic, and simply better looking than Gram-negative bacteria

7 days left to apply!