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/...
Happy to share our new work on how phages escape bacterial immunity.
We show that a phage homing endonuclease drives segmental amplification of anti-defense genes, pointing to a versatile and rapid mode of adaptation.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#PhageSky #MicroSky
Great summary by @philipcball.bsky.social! Our findings certainly don’t invalidate the central dogma, but rather demonstrate an unexpected (and cool!) structural mechanism by which a sequence-specific DNA is created in a cell. (1/6)
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 !
Excited to share our new findings in @science.org on how the DRT3 bacterial defense system uses a reverse transcriptase that builds DNA repeats without a nucleic acid template. Microbes never cease to amaze!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
🔈Paper out! We turned the most fascinating phage host-switch mechanism, diversity-generating retroelements, into a programmable mutagenesis tool, DGRec. You can perform targeted hypermutation of any 50-200bp sequence directly in vivo in E. coli www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Thank you Quanta Magazine for highlighting our studies on the bacterial immune system!
A phage-encoded sponge protein suppresses bacterial TIR-Caspase immune signaling | Nature Communications https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-71527-4
The phage nucleus synergizes with an anti-defense protein to resist bacterial immunity: Cell Reports www.cell.com/cell-reports...
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/...
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...
Such an incredible journey building DISCO 🪩. Love working with this team. DISCO is a co-design model with functional, de novo, new-to-nature enzymes. Huge shoutout to my co-authors for making this a reality! 🚀👇
Would carving of the mechanism of Metis antiphage defense
Our current understanding of the Metis defense system - carved in wood
By @naamalila.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Nucleoid-associated proteins sense phage-induced genome damage to elicit abortive infection www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...
Excited to see our work out in Science today! Using machine learning to identify prokaryotic immune systems www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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.
2.39 million antiphage proteins in 32,000 bacterial genomes!! Congratulations Aude & team!
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_...
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 🧬🦠🛡️
A big advance in the field of bacterial immunity, from the Bernheim and Laub labs
Bacteria have been fighting off viruses using a huge arsenal of molecular weaponry that scientists did not know about — until now. Researchers have identified proteins that could lead to virus-fighting drugs and technologies.
go.nature.com/4dqQnXI
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...
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...
Engineered phages evade the complete defense repertoire of highly phage-resistant MRSA clinical isolates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...
I am pleased to share my lab’s latest publication - Acinetobacter species lack canonical DNA repair pathway activation mechanisms, and we discovered a conserved transcriptional activator that fills this role: academic.oup.com/nar/article/...
Why do intrinsically disordered proteins appear larger than they are in SDS-PAGE? We investigate how sequence properties affect SDS-PAGE mobility using synthetic IDRs.
Conclusion: We need to consider both SDS binding and the compaction of protein-SDS complexes.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
I love this concept -- plasmid to Cryo structure in a day!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The latest AI/ML tools for co-folding proteins around small molecule ligands can produce impressive results.
Until you start looking at them closely.
A defense system that protects against RNA viruses by sensing a conserved RNA structure in the viral genome - cool!
