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/...

#joboffer #Germany
plz spread it

I'm hiring a Junior leader (E13; 100% for 3-5 y) to start own independence w/ focus on #CryoEM SPA or ET
Ideally 1-2y postdoc experience

Plz get in touch, if you are interested in #Structural biology & #MicroBiochem

@sfb1381.bsky.social @vaam-microbes.bsky.social

An Asgard archaeon from a modern analog of ancient microbial mats A novel Asgard archaeon, Nerearchaeum marumarumayae, is present in microbial mats in Shark Bay, Australia. Combining genomic and structural analyses, together with high-resolution electron cryotomography, Nobs et al. reveal that these archaea possess unique cellular features that reflect their ancestry as progenitors of the earliest eukaryotic cells.

An Asgard archaeon from a modern analog of ancient microbial mats: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext...

Today I stole some reading from our youngest daughter (9yo)...and guess what??? #archaea were there!!!
See special issue from Science et Vie Junior on Microbes, with a lot of interesting articles (not only for Kids...)...(in French)

Step by step #archées #archaea
#archaeasky

Postdoc position available in St Andrews for a structural biologist: www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

The phage nucleus synergizes with an anti-defense protein to resist bacterial immunity Morgan et al. show that a phage-encoded protein functions as an antitoxin to counter DarTG2-mediated phage defense. They further explore the interplay between this anti-defense protein, the phage nucleus replication compartment, which encloses chimallivirus genomes, and the DarTG2 phage defense system.

The phage nucleus synergizes with an anti-defense protein to resist bacterial immunity: Cell Reports www.cell.com/cell-reports...

We are recruiting postdocs to work on antimicrobial resistance and bacterial cell envelope biology. PLEASE SHARE.

The awesome virome logo of a phage above a strand of DNA

Have you developed a new #bioinformatics tool to understand #phage or #virus? Make sure you add it to #awesome-virome

github.com/shandley/awe...

Figure 1 shows the conceptual workflow of the algorithm. It first loads the configuration file and the input data of one or multiple binned metagenomes, yet evaluates each bin individually. It then iteratively processes each candidate bin in the input, going through the refinement tasks, potentially multiple times. The refinement either stops when the last step or a preset stop task have been reached or an unrecoverable error has been encountered. The algorithm tasks can be configured individually.

🤯 Manual MAG refinement? Still doing it by hand??

We’ve been there... You could just leave those messy, ill-assigned contigs/scaffolds in your data for NCBI to pick up during your submission…

…OR you could add itBins, our new automated MAG refiner by @jmk-ude.bsky.social, to your pipeline!! 🔥

How diverse is bacterial immunity ?

We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems.
👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

Phages communicate across species to shape microbial ecosystems Gallego-del-Sol et al. show that arbitrium-coding phages can sense non-cognate peptide signals from other phages to regulate lysis-lysogeny decisions. This crosstalk affects lysis-lysogeny outcomes of...

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...

Excited to share the first preprint from the lab! We show that ApeA defends against RNA phage infection by cleaving the phage genome:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Bacterial 2′,3′-cGAMP activates a SAVED effector to form membrane-disrupting filaments and restrict phage replication Tak et al. discover that bacteria use 2′,3′-cGAMP, the same signaling molecule employed by mammalian cGAS-STING, for phage defense. In response to phage, 2′,3′-cGAMP activates filament formation of Ca...

Happy to share the final version of my postdoc work on bacterial CBASS immunity with @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social published in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social

www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Open Positions -

Open postdoc position in my lab on HGT and interbacterial competition. We seek candidates with a PhD in microbiology (or related fields)+ strong 1st-author publications.
Curious, highly motivated, and dedicated team players ready to contribute fully are encouraged to apply. Details: tiny.cc/cz01101

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

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

Congrats Dina!🍾well deserved🙏👍

European Academy of Microbiology welcomes 95 new Fellows Discover the latest election of 95 new Fellows by the European Academy of Microbiology, highlighting diverse expertise in the field.

This is a moment to pause—with deep gratitude and a touch of humility—to share some exciting news: I’ve been elected as a Fellow of the European Academy of Microbiology (EAM). fems-microbiology.org/european-aca... [some words of thanks and thoughts in the comments]

Associate Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Molecular Microbiology The Department of Biology conducts research and teaching in many subject areas such as ecology, evolutionary biology, organismal biology and molecular biology. A total of approximately 300 people curr

Associate Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor position in Molecular Microbiology available at Lund University, Sweden:
lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

AlphaFold database has entered the era of complexes. Together with NVIDIA, DeepMind and EBI, we use ColabFold, OpenFold and MMseqs2-GPU to predict ~31 million complexes (homo & hetro-dimers) resulting in 1.8 million high-quality predictions
📄 research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/ass...
🌐 alphafold.ebi.ac.uk

We are excited to be recruiting into 3 Associate Professorship's in @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social. Come join us as a colleague and benefit from our vibrant and multidisciplinary environment. Reach out to me if you have any questions. Please repost! (tinyurl.com/48deybuu) (tinyurl.com/4pdvjaft).

Zehn Exzellenzstandorte werden weitergefördert. Das haben Wissenschaftsrat und @dfg.de gemeinsam mit Bundesforschungsministerin Dorothee Bär und Niedersachsens Wissenschaftsminister Falko Mohrs verkündet.

Pressemitteilung: www.wissenschaftsrat.de/DE/Home/Bueh...

#Exzellenzstrategie #ExStra

The textbooks say #archaea are non-pathogenic. True.
But maybe we’re not as irrelevant as you thought.

🚨 PhD Position in Plant Molecular Biology 🌱
We are looking for a motivated PhD student to join our team to study root protective barriers. If you are interested in confocal microscopy, cell wall biology, and plant development, this project might be for you! Please share!
#PlantScience #PlantSciJob

@alexjprobst.bsky.social look at this, we’re drilling over here!! 🥳

If you love RNA and RNA machineries as much as we do at @uniregensburg.bsky.social we encourage young scientists who want to start their own lab to apply.

Prediction of eukaryotic cellular complexity in Asgard archaea using structural modelling - Nature Microbiology A structural catalogue of the Asgard archaeal pangenome reveals hundreds of eukaryotic-like proteins that suggest a higher degree of cellular complexity in the archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes.

🧵 1/10 New paper out in @natmicrobiol.nature.com from my postdoc at @mib-wur.bsky.social! 🎉

How eukaryote-like was the archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes? Sequence searches alone can't tell us — so we used protein structure prediction to look deeper. 🧬
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#OnThisDay in 1938, American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis was born. Margulis is most known for developing and popularising the endosymbiotic theory, which explains how eukaryotic cells evolved organelles from simpler prokaryotic organisms that resided within another and became incorporated.

Prediction of eukaryotic cellular complexity in Asgard archaea using structural modelling Nature Microbiology, Published online: 05 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02273-yA structural catalogue of the Asgard archaeal pangenome reveals hundreds of eukaryotic-like proteins that suggest a higher degree of cellular complexity in the archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes.

Out Now! Prediction of eukaryotic cellular complexity in Asgard archaea using structural modelling #MicroSky

Pls re-post: My department @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social are recruiting for several new faculty positions (links below). Broad search in molecular biology/biochemistry, across prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Interested in understanding life at the molecular level, this job might be for you!
1/n

This is a fantastic paper with a very creative computational approach, that should inspire many "AlphaFlod-predicted shapes" screens.
Great friday read 📖📖