Congratulations to Karen Maxwell @themaxwelllab.bsky.social on the 2026 Peter Gilgan Canada Gairdner Momentum Award! An amazing selection and leader in the bacterial immunity field!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0pg...
Very proud of this work and all the efforts from my team and collaborators on this! You can now use DGRs for in vivo targeted hypermutagenesis in E. coli. We also included some early proof of concept in Yeast thanks to @seth-shipman.bsky.social !
Dissecting the genetic determinants of bacterial DNA degradation by bacteriophage T5 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...
This work a massive effort and needed a solid funding. We thank both NSF program and DOE Phage Foundry phagefoundry.org funding to make this happen.
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.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
There is so much to explore in this data that one can spend life time going through. To make it easier to go through the data, @miloj.bsky.social
put together this beautiful “Phage Datasheet”🤩
iseq.lbl.gov/PhageDataShe...
Enabling the prediction of phage receptor specificity from genome data www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...
Enabling the prediction of phage receptor specificity from genome data www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...
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_...
Excited to see our work out in Science today! Using machine learning to identify prokaryotic immune systems www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Happy to have made a small contribution for @gbouras13.bsky.social's study. Hope this is just one of many examples in independent researcher collaboration with academic scientists!
#archaeasky folks, this pipeline rules for global baseline annotation for archaea
doi.org/10.64898/202...
💻🧬🧫🦠
Can CRISPR edits enable precise tuning of plant gene expression? We think: yes.
In our newest manuscript, we measured the effects of >30,000 CRISPR-like promoter mutations in sorghum protoplasts.
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 see the major chapter of my PhD in print!
We present a massively-parallel approach for screening CRISPR edits in plants to speed up agricultural test cycles + benchmark genomic LMs.
Thanks to my fantastic co-authors and advisors. Link below!
Proud to share the yeast telomerase structure, led by the talented @hongmiaohu.bsky.social in collaboration with the Wellinger and Chartrand labs. Discovered 37 years ago and took us nearly 7 years but totally worth the wait 😍.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFE4...
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...
Out today in Nature Biotechnology — a team of IGI scientists including Brian Staskwicz, Kris Nyogi, Dave Savage (Savage Lab), Peggy Lemaux, & first author Evan Groover premier a cell-based method for understanding how #photosynthesis genes can be turned "up" or "down" https://ow.ly/KHWg50YyWbR
*And co-first author @ddingding.bsky.social!
@andrapia.bsky.social
Congratulations to our graduate student Pia Andrade for passing their quals and becoming a Ph.D Candidate! 🎉🥂
From the 2025 Banfield retreat, thank you for inviting us!
Congratulations to Dr. Zach LaTurner for publishing!
Cross-order detection of bacteriophage transduction in microbial communities using RNA barcoding
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The Cress lab is excited to welcome 2 new postdocs: Dr. Zach LaTurner from Rice University and Dr. Madeline Hayes from UW Madison, shared with @therubinlab.bsky.social
Huge congratulations to our graduate student, Ryuichi Ono, for publishing his first paper!
Host range and ARG dissemination are shaped by distinct survival strategies of conjugative plasmids: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Selection-free whole genome transplantation revives dead microbes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...
📢 Funded PhD in molecular microbiology & phage biology
How do bacterial stress responses control prophage activation and horizontal gene transfer?
Join us at St Andrews to dissect Clp protease–mediated regulation in Staphylococcus aureus.
Apply:
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Early-bird registration discounts for CRISPR 2026 expire Feb 28. CRISPR 2026, held at Yale University, June 10 - 12, is the continuation of the original CRISPR meeting established in 2008.
Register here: web.cvent.com/event/ac20b6...
Excited to share a preprint from my postdoc work in
Shipman’s lab!
We developed Detectrons — programmable biosensors that convert RNA signals into stable DNA barcodes inside living cells, enabling multiplexed RNA sensing. 🧵👇
biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New preprint on Detectrons from @jihoon-han.bsky.social! These are programmable biosensors for RNA that produce DNA barcodes in the presence of their target RNA. Check out Jihoon's quoted thread and the preprint for more:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
