Bacterial rRNAs are highly modified, but their functions are often mysterious. Zac Park says that methylation of 16S rRNA by MraW(RsmH) enhances translation of structured mRNAs. Thus, mRNA structure and rRNA modifications likely co-evolved to fine-tune protein dosage.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The Paul Farmer Lectureship and Award for Global Health Equity at @mcgill.ca @mcgillspgh.bsky.social

2026 Call for Nominations

www.mcgill.ca/spgh/about-u...

Applications are officially OPEN for the 2027 Gordon Research Conference on Multidrug Efflux Systems.

📅 When: March 21–26, 2027
📍 Where: Ventura, California
🔗 Apply here: www.grc.org/multi-drug-e...

#GRC #MultidrugEfflux

Congratulations to Charles L. Sawyers @sawyerslabmskcc.bsky.social, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, on receiving the Harrington Prize—award lecture happening now!

Overview of RB-TnSeq screens. Top left: Schematic for RB-TnSeq screen experimental set-up. Top middle: Pie chart depicting the number of RB-TnSeq screens completed for each category. Top right: Previously published TnSeq fitness with 27ng/mL isoniazid plotted against BarSeq fitness with 25 ng/mL isoniazid. Dotted line represents linear correlation between statistically significant hits from RB-TnSeq with TnSeq. Bottom left: BarSeq fitness (log2 fold change) for sugI (Rv3331) and sugA (Rv1236). Bottom right: Cofitness data for Rv3220c and Rv1626.

Discovery of gene functions in #Mycobacterium #tuberculosis has been slow. This study tests a genome-wide barcoded #transposon library across 95 environmental conditions, providing a rich resource of new gene functions, including metabolic & resistance pathways @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4vG0mz1

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

Why we won’t be funding open access publishing any more - Cancer Research UK - Cancer News The open access movement was bold and promising, but ultimately disappointing. Now is the time to stop and call for a new way to make publishing work…

CRUK goes green [OA] news.cancerresearchuk.org/2026/04/01/w...

Bacterial reporter–paired scRNA sequencing reveals cross talk between zinc starvation and zinc toxicity in macrophage antibacterial defense | PNAS Mechanisms by which macrophages deploy antibacterial zinc toxicity are poorly understood. To gain insight into this antimicrobial pathway, we devel...

Back on BlueSky after a long break !

Really happy to see the work of Jess finally out ! Amazing collaboration with UQ - in particular M.Schembri & M.Sweet!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

APEX-seq maps transcriptome-wide subcellular RNA localization in living cells Nature Protocols - This Protocol describes the transcriptome-wide labeling of RNAs in a particular subcellular compartment using proximity biotinylation by localized APEX2 enzyme and subsequent...

Excited to share our @natprot.nature.com paper on using RNA proximity labeling to map subcellular RNA transcriptomes. We’ve been working in this area for a while and wanted to create a resource paper to guide the uninitiated reader. rdcu.be/fblvI

Toolbox of FRET-based c-di-GMP biosensors and its FRET-To-Sort application for genome-wide mapping of c-di-GMP regulation - Nature Communications Cyclic di-GMP, a bacterial second messenger, governs many cellular processes including bacterial lifestyle transitions. Here, authors develop a set of FRET-based biosensors that enables them to monito...

Our paper describing a toolbox of FRET biosensors for c-di-GMP measurements in the cell and its application to elucidate the interplay between c-di-GMP and bacterial motility just appeared:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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

Our lab is hiring!

As our fierce technician is moving on to graduate school (GO ANNA!), we’re looking for a new tech to join our team studying bacteria-phage interactions.

Ideal for recent grads interested in molecular biology and microbiology - please reach out with a CV to aviramn@mskcc.org.

We've been we've been working on this for quite a while now (hopefully published soon). Grateful to @proftracypalmer.bsky.social for concinving me & @lislowe.bsky.social that mycobacteria produce inter-bacterial toxins. Team science, led by @sambenedict5.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Come join us at AITHYRA! I highly encourage anyone excited about the interplay between AI and life sciences to apply. It's been an amazing place to start a lab. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about our institute

Please Repost 🔄

Global Staphylococcus research community is heading to the Canadian Rockies!

Join the 20th International Symposium on Staphylococci and Staphylococcal Infections
📅 September 20–24, 2026

📍 Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada

#ISSSI2026
#Staphylococcus

Nontuberculous Mycobacteria: The Common Infections You’ve Possibly Never Heard Of Twenty facts about a surprisingly common group of infections.

Latest for @nejm.org, an attempt to bring much-needed attention to these challenging ID cases that for some reason receive so little attention -- NTM. #IDSky

Nontuberculous Mycobacteria: The Common Infections You’ve Possibly Never Heard Of | NEJM Voices voices.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

White House lifts hold on NIH research spending Director Jay Bhattacharya tells House lawmakers that grantmaking, hiring are on track

Biomedical researchers breathed a collective sigh of relief after the White House loosened the purse strings that had hindered the U.S. National Institutes of Health from spending its 2026 budget on research grants. https://scim.ag/4uTZpCT

Microbial Pathogenesis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis: Dawn of a Discipline “If we ask further what significance belongs to the results gained in this study of tuberculosis it must be considered a gain for science that it has been possible for the first time to establish the ...

25 years ago, I wrote this review:
www.cell.com/fulltext/S00... The progress in these 25 years is astounding and a testament to the collective dedication of the TB community to understanding this pathogen. Apologies to those colleagues we could not cite because of space constraints. #microsky

Mycobacterium tuberculosis as a model system | Journal of Bacteriology We are thrilled to contribute an installment in this series on microbial model systems to the Journal of Bacteriology. In launching this series (1), the editors envisioned that each installment could serve as an introduction to a field for the major bacterial model systems. In this sense, writing this installment on Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) presents some great opportunities and some challenges. There are already two excellent installments in this series covering Mycobacterium smegmatis (2) and Mycobacterium marinum (3), and we refer the reader to these reviews for related insights on the use of these mycobacteria as models. The most substantive challenge is to define how M. tuberculosis is a model, and what is it a model for? In considering these challenges, we have chosen to highlight several different interpretations of “M. tuberculosis as model.” We first consider M. tuberculosis as a model system for prokaryotic biology and emphasize the areas for which the study of Mtb has expanded prokaryotic dogmas established from the earlier model systems of Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. Second, we consider experimental systems that seek to model the pathogenesis of tuberculosis as a human disease. As an obligate human pathogen, all attempts to use surrogate systems are ultimately imperfect models of the human infection. Finally, we highlight the ways in which M. tuberculosis, as a global pathogen with massive disease burden but little commercial interest in therapeutic development, has been a model for public-private partnerships in drug and diagnostic development, with notable successes that can be a model for other fields. Common to all of these interpretations of “Mtb as model” are two inescapable microbiologic features that impact all experimental work with Mtb: its slow growth rate and its requirement for BSL3 containment. Due to the nature of the broad scope of biology covered in this review, we apologize for our inability to cite all the excellent work that our field has contributed to the bacteriology literature over the past decades.

It was a Glickman Lab team effort with Emilee Barnard, Maria Elgrail, Allison Fay, and Yaprak Ozakman. For me, reviewing the progress in our field was awe inspiring. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

..a series on Microbial Model Systems: journals.asm.org/topic/sss-ta... . I was thrilled to be asked to write an installment on M. tuberculosis, titled, unimaginatively: "M. tuberculosis as a model system. "

Bacteria are the first model system and continue to amaze with the diversity of biology they exhibit, confounding the bias of non-microbiologists who tend to think of bacteria as "simple". Recognizing this important history, @geiselbiofilm.bsky.social, EIC of Journal of Bacteriology @asm.org started

Thrilled to see the thesis work of @akrebs.bsky.social out in the world!
#microsky

Annual reminder: if you’ve been accepted to multiple graduate programs and are still deciding, please let the ones you’re definitely not going to know as soon as possible!

-Someone who got into his PhD off the waitlist the day after the deadline

What if philanthropy helped shape not only what research gets done, but who succeeds in science?

Foundations can play a powerful role in building stronger career pathways for early-career scientists through training, mentorship, and community.

Read more: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#bwfcareer

Angelika Amon was an inspiration, and I’m deeply grateful for my time in her lab. Please encourage PhD students outside the US who embody her excellence in research & infectious passion for biology to apply. ki.mit.edu/events/prize...

🦠

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...

Bioinformatics Specialist I - Brown Lab Primary Work Address: 1275 York Avenue, New York, NY, 10021 Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. About the Lab The Brown Laboratory studies how the tissue microenviron...

We are hiring! The Brown Lab is looking for a computational biologist to join our team.
If you enjoy working with single-cell and spatial genomics data and want to study how immune cells develop and function, we’d love to hear from you!

Apply here:

hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...

A true pioneer. Here is her obituary which has this quote about discovering SOS: “At this point, I asked, ‘Why did they survive? Maybe a mutation made them resistant,’”

www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/s...

Poster of the 2026 CSHA meeting on Bacterial Infection & Host Defense.

Please join us for the Cold Spring Harbor Asia @cshlnews.bsky.social meeting on Bacterial Infection & Host Defense this May 11-15 in Suzhou, China! We have a fantastic lineup of speakers. Abstract deadline is March 6. Hope to see you there!