MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship 2026 opportunity. Join my team at Lyon 1 University Claude Bernard to study functional genetics of plant pathogens.
Full details are available in the attached document. Internal Deadline: June 15, 2026

I find something amiss with this figure depicting the GAC system network in Pseudomonas aeruginosa published here: journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Should the RsmA binding sites be represented as a double-stranded helix? 🤔

It’s confusing about what this protein actually does. Don't you think ?

Travailler à Lyon, c'est profiter d'une qualité de vie reconnue, entre patrimoine de l'UNESCO et proximité des Alpes, sur un campus en bordure du parc de la Tête d'Or.

Contactez-moi (Erwan Gueguen) pour + d'infos

Nous recrutons un Maître ou une Maîtresse de conférences en bactériologie moléculaire pour notre équipe MTSB au laboratoire MAP à Lyon, France.
Le poste combine recherche sur l'adaptation des bactéries phytopathogènes et enseignement en génétique microbienne.
Notre team : sites.google.com/view/mtsb

This study is the first to identify mutations in a small regulatory RNA as a driver of social cheating. By acting as a molecular rheostat, ArcZ remodeling uncouples virulence from antimicrobial production, allowing cheaters to exploit public goods for a competitive advantage.

New pub. from the lab !

We discovered that potato tubers exert intense selective pressure during Dickeya solani infection, driving the rapid emergence of mutations in the sRNA ArcZ. These mutations lead to the appearance of "social cheaters" that sweep through the pop. in as few as 30 generations.

Streptomyces secretes a siderophore that sensitizes competitor bacteria to phage infection - Nature Microbiology A secondary metabolite sensitizes competitor Bacillus subtilis to a wide panel of lytic phages by sequestering iron and preventing the activation of Spo0A.

Microbes weaponizing secondary metabolites to make rivals vulnerable to phage attack 🧪🦠

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Institut Pasteur Canetti Prize 2025 awarded to Céline Loot for her innovative contributions to infectious disease research. ©Institut Pasteur

©Institut Pasteur

🏆 Institut Pasteur Canetti Prize 2025 awarded to Céline Loot for her innovative contributions to infectious disease research.

This annual Institut Pasteur prize (€15K) honors scientific excellence, funded by the Canetti family legacy.

Congratulations Céline 👏

Adapting CRISPR-associated transposons for rapid and high-throughput reverse genetics CRISPR-associated transposons (CAST) use guide RNAs to direct their transposition and are being harnessed as tools for programmable genome engineering across diverse bacterial species. However, CAST s...

#mycrosky #synbio

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lost Science is a new NYT series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding. You can send your story to the Times here www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...

Have you wondered if some E. clones are so successful because of their plasmids? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A combination of bioinf and lab work showed that some plasmids have coexisted for centuries, and that a specific colicin gene is able to kill other clones paving their way for success!

How do spontaneous mutations arise?

In this latest #GENETICS review, Susan Lovett and @thalia.bsky.social provide a detailed overview of bacterial genetics experiments instrumental in understanding how genomes change. buff.ly/CXJnTqn

Pseudomonas aeruginosa lasR is a keystone gene in polymicrobial cultures The airways of people with cystic fibrosis (CF) are often co-infected by Pseudomonas aeruginosa and a variety of other co-habiting microbes; the infections are polymicrobial. P. aeruginosa isolates fr...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#microsky

Targeted protein evolution in the gut microbiome by diversity-generating retroelements Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) accelerate evolution by rapidly diversifying variable proteins. The human gastrointestinal microbiota harbors the greatest density of DGRs known in nature, su...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#microsky #microbiome

DGRs FTW

A trimodal protein language model enables advanced protein searches - Nature Biotechnology A protein foundation model represents protein sequence, structure and function.

Quite an interesting protein search AI model combining sequence, structure, and function text - faster and more accurate than similarity searches. Who has tried it🤩🙌? Only a few secs to search bacterial TFs and integrases #microsky 🧬🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

De novo discovery of conserved gene clusters in microbial genomes with Spacedust - Nature Methods This work presents Spacedust, a tool for de novo identification of conserved gene clusters from metagenomic data.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#microsky #genomics #phagesky #phage defense

#ResultatScientifique🔎| Des scientifiques ont révélé comment le plasmide pOXA-48 rend les bactéries ultra-résistantes aux antibiotiques 🦠
🤝 @cnrs.fr @mmsb-lyon.bsky.social @cnrs-rhoneauvergne.bsky.social
✍️ @sbigot.bsky.social
📕 @natcomms.nature.com | buff.ly/u3Cy4Db

Will anyone review this paper? Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even ...

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint.

This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

A bacterial host factor confines phage localization for excluding the infected compartment through cell division Viruses frequently induce the formation of specialized subcellular compartments to facilitate their replication and assembly. Here, we describe a “hos…

A bacterial host factor confines phage localization for excluding the infected compartment through cell division

@cp-cellreports.bsky.social from Sigal Ben-Yehuda

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Today in the journal Science: BioEmu from Microsoft Research AI for Science. This generative deep learning method emulates protein equilibrium ensembles – key for understanding protein function at scale. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

@cnrsecologie.bsky.social regrette profondément l'adoption de cette loi à la vision court-termiste & ses conséquences graves sur l’environnement, qui méprise santé & bien-être de la population & le rôle des espèces sauvages dans la prod. agricole. La communauté scientifique n'a pas été entendue.

Universal rules govern plasmid copy number - Nature Communications Plasmids exhibit a broad range of sizes and copies per cell, and these two parameters appear to be negatively correlated. Here, Ramiro-Martínez et al. analyse the copy number of thousands of diverse b...

🚨🚨New paper out in @natcomms.nature.com!!

Come for the first large-scale analysis of plasmid copy number across species,
stay for one of the most intriguing results of my lab: universal scaling laws in plasmid biology! 📈🧬

👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Harnessing Small RNAs as Synthetic Post-transcriptional Regulators in Bacteria Bacteria can respond to environmental changes by expressing small RNAs (sRNAs), which regulate mRNAs by complementary base-pairing. This regulatory mechanism allows bacteria to rapidly adapt their proteome. In recent years, sRNAs have gained attention as blueprints for synthetic regulators allowing control over user-defined targets. Multiple aspects need to be considered for efficient application of these versatile, on-demand, and easy-to-use tools. Advances in computational prediction and bioengineering concepts are the dawn of systematic synthetic sRNA biology. We provide an overview of sRNAs and alternative post-transcriptional regulators, highlight the requirements for successful regulation, and provide guidelines for design, construction, and sRNA application.

Harnessing Small RNAs as Synthetic Post-transcriptional Regulators in Bacteria
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Phenotypic characterization of RloA protease mutants in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. (A) Biofilm formation in PA14 wild type and ∆rloA1-3 mutants was assessed through crystal violet staining of overnight cultures grown in 0.4% Arginine M63 media (top). Graph shows the normalized average intensity of crystal violet staining (OD550) relative to the growth of the corresponding bacterial culture (OD600), n = 4. Error bars show standard deviation. (B) PA14 wild-type and ∆rloA1-3 mutant colonies were grown in Congo red 0.2% glucose M63 agar. Scale bar represents 2 mm. (C) Ampicillin ETEST strips tested on lawns of PA14 wild-type and ∆rloA1-3 mutant strains grown on Mueller-Hinton agar. Graph shows the average minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) from triplicate experiments. Error bars show standard deviation. (D) Scanning electron micrographs of PA14 wild-type (top) and ∆rloA1-3 mutant cells (bottom). Scale bar represents 4 µm.

Researchers uncover a new class of retropepsin-like proteases in P. aeruginosa that are required for biofilm formation & bacterial survival under stress conditions, including antibiotic exposure, making them appealing therapeutic targets. #mBio: asm.social/2sq

A porin-like protein used by bacterial predators defines a wider lipid-trapping superfamily - Nature Communications This study reveals that an outer membrane protein from the predator Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus forms a pentameric assembly that traps a lipid monolayer within. This allows the discovery of two superfa...

Check out these amazing lipid-monolayer-trapping oligomeric OMPs published by @lalouxlab.bsky.social and Lovering Labs. The BAM complex in these bugs must be wild!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Where is the money going? In the case of for-profit publishers it's very clear:

Your open access fees fund corporate profit margins.

Profit margins for large academic publishers can far exceed those of household names like Amazon and Apple.

chart source: bit.ly/4leULKi
#scipub #academicsky

I am delighted to be taking part in the 8th meeting on RNA regulation in bacteria and archaea, to be held in Strasbourg from September 1-4.

This is my first time, and I'm really looking forward to meeting the experts on this topic.

microbialrnameeting.com

#MicrobialRNAs

A foundation model for the Earth system - Nature Aurora, a new large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data, outperforms operational forecasts in predicting air quality, ocean wave dynamics, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather.

A paper in Nature presents an AI model that can outperform existing Earth system forecasts. The model, named Aurora, could enable more accurate and efficient forecasting of air quality, tropical cyclone paths, and ocean wave dynamics, as well as high-resolution weather forecasting. 🌊 ⚒️ 🧪

Bacterial reverse transcriptase synthesizes long poly-A–rich cDNA for antiphage defense Prokaryotic defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) were recently identified with antiviral functions; however, their functional mechanisms remain largely unexplored. Here we show that DRT9 f...

🫴 Wow: A bacterial reverse transcriptase synthesizes long poly-A–rich cDNA for anti phage defense:

👇👇👇

@science.org

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🎓 Looking for a postdoc with a background in bacteriology to join my team to study pectinolytic bacteria via a #MSCA fellowship 🇪🇺 (up to 3 yrs in France).
📅 Expression of interest by June 15. The MSCA application deadline is September 10, 2025.
🔗 Info in attached files
#Pectobacteriaceae