Bacteriophages are in a constant arms race with bacteria 🦠 The Phage ORFeome pooled library from the Aaron Whiteley lab contains phage proteins that activate antiphage defense systems — a tool to dissect the mechanisms of bacterial immunity. Aaron Whiteley

Anyone recommend any rust implementations of consensus generation via partial order alignment?

Sneaky bastards! I turned off CoPilot in Outlook when it appeared about a year ago. Just noticed it reappeared and I had to turn it off again.

Keeping useless AI creep at bay requires constant vigilance... and it's tiring.

Join us in Montreal for the Canada/US Northeast hub!

I will give a talk and @gmdouglas.bsky.social @nagissa.bsky.social & Tim Blower will surely give *great talks*

Opportunities for student talks and posters and a good time guaranteed!

The Social Lives of Viruses is coming to Vancouver, Canada, from 4th-8th August 2026!

This is a free meeting dedicated to all aspects of virus-virus interactions & evolution.

To apply: socialviruses.zoology.ubc.ca

@sociovirology.bsky.social #socialviruses #evosky #lovevirology #virosky

Rapid evolution of Klebsiella pneumoniae biofilms in vitro delineates adaptive changes selected during infection - Nature Communications Biofilm formation on implanted medical devices facilitates infection by the pathogen Klebsiella pneumoniae. Here, Zaborskytė et al. use experimental evolution to show that the bacteria rapidly evolve ...

🆒 new pub!
Rapid evolution of Klebsiella pneumoniae biofilms in vitro -> adaptations selected during infection by @gretazabo.bsky.social & Linus Sandegren
*hypermucoidy evolves via 📈c-di-GMP, overlaps w/ mutations in UTI and wound isolates.
*pleasure to advise this!

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

Hey y’all. As many of you know I’ve had a tough few months. I’m just now getting a *little* bit of bandwidth to work on #BinningSingletons and I need some help to get to #ASMicrobe this year. #MicroSky 🦠🧪

Finally managed to get a new version of rTPC (v1.1.0) onto CRAN, with @franwin.co.uk driving most of the changes. There are now 49 models included.

cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

And parallel fitting of TPCs can be done using mirai and purrr.
padpadpadpad.github.io/rTPC/article...

🧪 #rstats

Excited to share our new paper out today in @science.org 🎉

We show that HGT via natural competence drives diversification of chromosomal integrons in V. cholerae 🤩

Below a 🧵 on key findings incl. background on natural competence in V. cholerae 1/
#microsky #phagesky
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Universal bacterial clade dynamics dominate under predation despite altered phenotypes and mutation targets Abstract. Recent studies have revealed bacterial genome-wide evolution to be complex and dynamic even in a constant environment, characterized by the emerg

Results from a long term bacteria - ciliate experiment:

academic.oup.com/evolut/advan...

PostDoc position available!
(links in post below)

Feel free to share!

Our ms on re-sampling 4 years apart vibrio phage in natural environments is now out with some improvements. First, clearer evidence of cryptic population dynamics between phage and vibrio, presumably because of genetic diversity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A fun manuscript which came out as a preprint around the same time as I published my own preprint on CRISPR-Cas - TA plasmid interactions, using the same model plasmid RP4!
I loved seeing these single-cell expts which matched up with my observations.
Congrats to all involved on getting this out!

Revealing community dynamics in polymicrobial infections through a quantitative framework Abstract. Laboratory models provide tractable, reproducible systems that have long served as foundational tools in microbiology. However, the extent to whi

Above link seems broken 😞, so here: academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

1/25 New paper out in PNAS! We show that the fitness costs of reproductive specialization, where somatic cells give up reproduction, scale inversely with organism size. Larger organisms can afford far more soma, removing a key barrier to multicellular complexity.

Whenever I presented Phold, I was frequently asked "can you do the same beyond phages?" We ( @oschwengers.bsky.social @linsalrob.bsky.social @binomicalabs.org et al) finally did it with Baktfold github.com/gbouras13/ba... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's such a good read! Congrats 🎉

@paulturnerlab.bsky.social and I wrote a perspective on the need and recently developed approaches to study individual virus traits in the most numerous viruses on our planet (phages).

Let's move beyond measuring the mean #phagesky

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

#microsky #virology #microscopy

A family of endonucleases blocks nanotube-mediated plasmid exchange - Nature Microbiology The YokF endonuclease provides a donor-controlled mechanism to limit plasmid transfer to recipient bacteria via nanotubes in Bacillus subtilis, with YokF functional homologues found across Gram-positi...

#microsky #phagesky #MGE

A prophage-encoded endonuclease blocks plasmid transfer between bacterial cells

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

Nice highlight of both Laub's lab and our work !
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Still so much to discover in the amazing world of bacteria immunity 🧬🦠🛡️

Phage receptor prediction from genome sequencing alone. Bacterial receptor (blue) interacting with phage proteins (purple) is shown here

📣Huge preprint 🔔
Today we share something our group has been working toward for a long time, led by @lucasmoriniere.bsky.social We asked can we predict which receptor a phage targets from its genome sequence alone? For most phages, we couldn’t. So Lucas set out to do something I had only dreamed of.

🔊 Looking for a Research Assistant in Bacterial Evolution to join my lab 🦠
🥼Main duties: Research (AMR + microbiome) + lab assistance.
⏲️ Post duration: 30 months
🗓️ Closing date for applications: 20th April 2026
💰 Salary: ~£35k

Details and how to apply: tinyurl.com/2a3v66y7

Please share!

PLEASE SHARE. PhD Opportunity with me, Ben Raymond and Jan Engelstaedter and Andrew Letten at University of Queensland.

Experimentally testing mechanisms of how temperature may change selection and spread of AMR in E. coli. Coupled with some advanced modelling and sequencing.

🧪🦠 #microsky

This, and the scene where he touches his face *while wearing gloves* really ruins the rewatchability for me.

Now out in AEM @asm.org! 🎉🧪

*High school student-isolated mutants 👉🏻 novel genetic causes of biofilm-associated adaptations
*We learn how diversity arises quickly and is maintained
*EvolvingSTEM enables scalable research in classrooms & promotes scientific literacy

journals.asm.org/eprint/FBU9M...

Rapid resistance evolution against phage cocktails Abstract. When bacteria are treated with multiple antibiotics simultaneously, resistance is highly unlikely to evolve. In contrast, resistance against mult

Rapid resistance evolution against phage cocktails

#ISMEJournal by Baltus van der Steen, Matti Gralka, and @yuvalmulla.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

A Type VII-secreted toxin enables inter-mycobacterial competition www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

An appeal for help from the #science / #SciArt community please - ideally but not exclusively in the palaeo sector:
Are there any charities (UK or international) specifically focussed on supporting women and girls into careers in science (especially from underprivileged/marginalised groups)?
(1/2)

So happy to see this finally published in @plosbiology.org!

This is the first chapter of @julielebris.bsky.social PhD thesis demonstrating how capsules are exchanged by plug-and-play dynamics
w/ @epcrocha.bsky.social
#microsky @klebclub.bsky.social
Link below-
Check out her 🧵 for more details!

I love this concept -- plasmid to Cryo structure in a day!

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