🫶 En dan vieren we dat het Kerst is, in April.

LOL. Nee dat wil niemand

Ja goed, het is geen utopie. Bijna geen auto's is betrekkelijk, maar toch eigenlijk wel toepasbaar op centra van e.g. Amsterdam, Groningen en Utrecht als je het internationaal vergelijkt. In Mainz (waar ik woon) zijn er ~evenveel auto's als in Utrecht. Voor bijna de helft inwoners. Dat is hier laag.

Dat busje staat daar ook zo lekker op het fietspad de before and after te verpesten ><. We moeten over 20 jaar street view er maar weer bij pakken.

We're hiring a Postdoctoral Fellow!

How does Mycobacterium tuberculosis survive drug treatment? You'll use molecular genetics and single-cell approaches to investigate how gene expression variability drives drug-tolerant subpopulations.

Full details and application instructions below.

This morning's breakfast had a belated Easter surprise.

Agree. Definitely looks like Amsterdam Oud West or de Pijp perhaps. But with low res I can't place it.

Wacht... Dit bestaat echt? Ik vond dit een best goede grap over diversiteit. Maar die site is eng. Brrrr

With immortal bass lines like California Girls and Good Vibrations 🙏

Truly humbled and deeply honored to have been elected a Fellow of the European Academy of #Microbiology, @femsmicro.org
Profoundly grateful to my mentors, collaborators, colleagues, and students, past and present, whose guidance, creativity, and dedication have shaped this journey 🙏 ♥️

Nice! Congrats Olivier!

⌛Only few days left!

👉 Save your spot on time!

🔗 Register now: tinyurl.com/yefis2026-ic1

You could say that Rock n Roll was born 111 years ago today in Arkansas, but probably not where you'd think. Before there was a Chuck Berry or Little Richard, there was those who wanted to be like her.

Rosetta Nubin better known as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the godmother of Rock was born on this day

Please help spread the word about this 3-year postdoc position in my team.

If your expertise & interest lie in studying how organisms from different domains of life (Bacteria and Archaea) communicate, come join us this summer in cozy Odense, Denmark.

Job post: www.nature.com/naturecareer...

I'll be speaking at the @yefis-immunology.bsky.social webinar next week. Tune in for some mRNA #tuberculosis vaccine updates.

A phylogenetic tree of insects is shown annotating the presence or absence of a an antimicrobial peptide gene across winged insects

Various phylogenetic secondary loss events are mapped to a tree of insects to explain the parsimony calculations necessary to explain the diversity of insect Drosomycin antimicrobial peptide genes

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are key defence molecules of the innate immune system of plants and animals. Understanding the evolutionary origins of AMPs can help to explain how immune systems acquire novelty and vary in their defensive capabilities. However, AMPs evolve rapidly, and so the origins of similar AMPs across organisms is often unclear. Furthermore, false negatives due to low search sensitivity are common and can hinder confident annotations about true absences. Due to these difficulties, understanding whether similar AMP genes found in diverse organisms represent ancestral molecules or evolutionary novelties has been challenging. In this report, we present evidence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of the antifungal peptide gene Drosomycin across insects. We show that in Diptera, the presence of Drosomycin is restricted to the Melanogaster group and additionally the distant relative Drosophila busckii. We go on to recover Drosomycin genes in cockroaches (Blattodea), mantises (Mantodea), one katydid (Orthoptera), various beetles (Coleoptera), and a recently acquired pseudogenized Drosomycin locus in Liposcelis booklice (Psocodea), but no other insects. Explaining this diversity through shared ancestry requires at least 50 independent loss events, or just seven HGT events. Previous studies have suggested that similar AMPs found across divergent species reflect conservation from a common ancestor, or due to their small size, that they arose via convergent evolution resulting from pathogen-imposed selection. Our findings suggest horizontal gene transfer can be responsible for the presence of some AMP genes found scattered across the tree of life. By presenting a mechanism through which immune systems can acquire novelty, our study also suggests a possible explanation for certain lineage-specific competencies for defence against infectious disease. While loss of AMP genes is common in certain lineages, here we suggest gain of AMPs can occur just as suddenly.

Pleased to finally share this fun collab that began at #Ento23

@cedricaumont.bsky.social presented & I had seen NCBI annotated some cockroach genomes as "contaminated." Turns out NCBI & I were wrong (much more fun).

Horizontal transfer of an #AntimicrobialPeptide across insects
bit.ly/DrsHGT

1/🧵

Gefeliciteerd Jeroen!

Stuff of nightmares 😅

Meer dan mooie woorden: de universiteit heeft een strategie nodig met radicaal vertrouwen en een biologisch fundament - Vox magazine OPINIE - De nieuwe strategie van de Radboud Universiteit ontvouwt zich als een gedurfde visie die de traditionele bescheidenheid van zich afschudt, schrijft hoogleraar microbiologie Mike Jetten. Maar ...

OPINIE - De nieuwe strategie van RU is een gedurfde visie die de bescheidenheid van zich afschudt, schrijft Mike Jetten : 'we kunnen het ons niet veroorloven een generatie briljante talenten te verliezen omdat ze te uitgeput zijn door bureaucratie & gebrek aan budgetten www.voxweb.nl/opinie/meer-...

Just checked your company. You clearly are familiar. Best of luck!

An illustration of the Lone Star tick, Amblyomma americanum

The best immunologists on Earth don't have PhDs. They're parasites.

Today's spotlight 🧵(and big inspo for @ dittobio): ticks!

And if you like this, stay tuned because we will be sharing cool parasite facts each week #TickTalk

I would agree, with the first part. But to compete with ticks. Are you acquainted with Schistosoma sp.? Living undetected in our bloodstream for decades. Just romantically spooning and producing offspring.

Leuke en informatieve column. Als bewoner van Mainz ook maar even de column over de naamgeving gelezen. Ik was even in de war, waarom een Nederlandse column op een Duitse site zou staan...

Living with antimicrobial-resistant TB In this blog post Samara shares her story of fighting antimicrobial -resistant tuberculosis, the hidden long-term consequences and the importance of getting that persistent cough checked out.

"AMR doesn't just mean different drugs; it means longer treatment, more side effects, and a much harder journey back to health." A patient's experience of living with antimicrobial-resistant TB: ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2025/12/04/l...

Programme Discover the programme of the Triple I Conference.

Very excited and TBH some old-fashioned (good) nerves to speak on #mRNA #tuberculosis vaccines at the Utrecht 3I conference today!
If you're there, do say hi.
www.uu.nl/en/research/...

Lovely weekend of seeing friends and family compete at the indoor Euro ultimate Frisbee championships.

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him.

White. Hot. Rage.

'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.

It's always the same hallucination across time and space and in whatever country the mushroom grows in. Extremely weird.

www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Many of you in the mycobacterial community attended the awesome inaugural 2025 Biology of Mycobacteria GRC, organized by @heran.bsky.social and myself: www.grc.org/biology-of-m....

I am writing with an update about this conference as the new chair.

This is your reminder that Hungarian-Jewish scientist George de Hevesy dissolved two Nobel Prizes in aqua regia to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis.

He then left the dissolved solution on his shelf and fled to Sweden.

(After the war he un-dissolved the gold and the prizes were re-cast.)