Structures of the QatBC complex from Angela Gao and Doug Wassarman in our group reveal an evolutionary link between QatABCD and Type IV CBASS and a role for protein deazguanylation in diverse anti-phage defense systems
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Happy to share our new work on how phages escape bacterial immunity.
We show that a phage homing endonuclease drives segmental amplification of anti-defense genes, pointing to a versatile and rapid mode of adaptation.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#PhageSky #MicroSky
A very nice review of AI in protein engineering from @jlistgarten.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
New OpenFold3 preview out! (OF3p2)
It closes the gap to AlphaFold3 for most modalities.
Most critically, we're releasing everything, including training sets & configs, making OF3p2 the only current AF3-based model that is functionally trainable & reproducible from scratch🧵1/9
Such an incredible journey building DISCO 🪩. Love working with this team. DISCO is a co-design model with functional, de novo, new-to-nature enzymes. Huge shoutout to my co-authors for making this a reality! 🚀👇
That Trump post is a clear expression of genocidal intent. Clear cut case with zero caveats.
Design enzymes using a model that generates sequence and structure given the substrate as a ligand.
@lileics.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Got my favourite protein complex from now on!
Call for Targets: CASP17 (2026)
Depositors: Help advance the frontiers of structural biology by submitting your targets
45 novel protein folds in the updated AFESM (AFDB + ESMatlas) manuscript:
• 12 high-confidence folds in AFESM
• 33 by ColabFold-repredicting 2.3M low-quality domains
We show AFDB captures most domains already and ESMfold struggles with novelty
🌏 afesm.foldseek.com
📄 biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Excited to see our work out in Science today! Using machine learning to identify prokaryotic immune systems www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The PhageExpressionAtlas just made it to bioRxiv. Visually explore the transcriptomes of phage-host interactions or harness the database for analysis across infections! Please leave feedback, which functionalities/data you find missing.
Preprint:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#phagesky #microsky
Distilling the most confident mutation effect scores across different versions of the same protein language model results in a superior sequence-only variant effect predictor.
@vntranos.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This paper started as an idea @albertomarina.bsky.social had many years ago… which of course means he was right all along 😄. Some of us just needed a few years (and a lot of experiments) to catch up.
Grateful (and slightly humbled) to be part of this. Thanks Alberto!
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
This is the top reason I will develop type 2 diabetes by the age of 40.
Congratulations! How exciting to see such paper out!
How do you kill a MRSA superbug armed with 15 different anti-phage defense systems? You make a smarter phage. Check out our latest preprint on overcoming bacterial immunity using defense-guided engineering to build durable therapeutic phage cocktails! Led by Sarah Voss. doi.org/10.64898/202...
Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities academic.oup.com/femsre/artic...
Not only are our "leaders" chasing oil and denying climate change, they are also actively accelerating climate change with their wars & conflicts
"War in the Middle East is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined"
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
Simultaneous inhibition of bacterial virulence & anti-phage defense by synergistic bacteriophage counter-defense proteins:
Shuai Le, Haihua Liang et al show how Dap2 sequesters T3SS activators & prevents Pseudomonas host from inactivating a key phage endonuclease
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Gut phage Acrs
Type II CRISPR-Cas systems dominate human gut w/diverse phage Acrs targeting these systems. Widespread family, GutAcraca, adopts similar structures to inhibit Cas9 & regulate its own expression, highlighting phage adaptation to gut ecology
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
Paper out: Profiling of lytic phage infection in individual B. fragilis cells with bacterial scRNA-seq. Congratulations Anika Gupta, Norma Morella, @monochamussutor.bsky.social Dmitry Sutormin et al, in collaboration with Georg Seelig (UW) and Neel Dey (Fred Hutch). www.nature.com/articles/s41...
You asked, we listened. Millions of AI-predicted protein complex structures are now available in the #AlphaFold Database.
This spans homodimers from 20 of the most studied species, including humans, as well as the World Health Organization’s priority pathogens list.
www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/t...
Can't wait to read this!
How can we tap into the enormous functional diversity of microbes on this planet?
Join us at EMBL Heidelberg (8–10 Dec 2026) to learn about ongoing efforts to decode gene function and organisation in human gut microbes, and present your science.
Our paper with @sokrypton.org using AlphaFold2 to predict small-molecule binding sites in proteins is now out in Nature Methods! 🧵
rdcu.be/e7SnX
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
First day wearing vision glasses! Seeing everything clearly, especially from a distance, makes such a big difference. It also made me realise how much my vision has deteriorated over the last few years and how important healthy habits are: good posture, the right work setup, and regular exercise.
After >10 years of our lab studying bacterial cGAS-like enzymes, @hobbslabutah.bsky.social finally reconstitutes viral sensing in vitro and discovers how these ancient receptors sense phage protease enzymes to detect virion assembly and activate antiviral immunity
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
