Thanks Aaron for a great community resource!

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 !

Finally published. Many thanks to a wonderful collaborative team and scientific platforms!!! And thanks to editors and reviewers for enthusiasm and a great review.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thank you to @vcallier.bsky.social and Quanta Magazine for highlighting our lab along with the incredible research from @soreklab.bsky.social @audeber.bsky.social @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social @benmorehouse.bsky.social @teralevin.bsky.social @algao.bsky.social Eugene Koonin, L. Aravind and others!

Epigenetic regulation in prokaryotes: transcriptional and phenotypic outcomes of DNA methyltransferase activity This review shows how DNA methylation acts as a regulatory layer in bacteria and archaea, shaping diverse biological traits and behaviours.

Epigenetic regulation in prokaryotes: transcriptional and phenotypic outcomes of DNA methyltransferase activity | FEMS Microbiology Reviews | Oxford Academic academic.oup.com/femsre/advance-article/d...

Great to see exciting work from @megllewellyn.bsky.social on how expression context shapes the protection provided by bacterial defence systems. Comparing chromosomal and plasmid-encoded systems highlights how regulatory architecture influences defence effectiveness.

Stephen Lillie on the return of the Artemis II crew – cartoon After experiencing the ‘overwhelming emotions’ of their moon fly-past, the astronauts find it’s back to business as usual at home with Trump

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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

🤞Go Rory!

Promotional banner for R for Biochemists 201 online training on 18 May 2026 with registration details and Biochemical Society logo.

Starting 18 May, R for Biochemists 201 builds on R101 to advance your skills in proteomic data analysis, tidy data, reproducible workflows & data visualisation. Register now! https://ow.ly/B0uc50YEZ1y

Impossible to disagree with a single word that Ben Rhodes (Obama era NSC official) is saying here:

Repurposing anti-phage defenses to differentially arrest the viral lifecycle reveals the regulatory logic of a parasitic satellite | bioRxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

From the abstract

'Also, hot from electric and warm from move make more hot, so need in work like earth heat take, oil get, and hot change machine in hole thing.'

🤣🤣🤣

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.

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 🧬🦠🛡️

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_...

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...

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...

US has caused $10tn worth of climate damage since 1990, research finds US, top carbon emitter in history, has ‘a lot of responsibility’ for causing ‘substantial’ harm globally, scientist says

This is a suprise to no-one

And it won't stop until our planet is a blistering wasteland

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Haha, it's great that we're all waiting to see if the sitting President of the United States destroys the global economy tomorrow for no reason, right? This is fun. Love the suspense of all our lives hanging in the balance on the whims of an unstable, raging narcissist.

Discovery of human gut phage-encoded anti-CRISPR proteins unveils diverse mechanisms for phages to evade type II CRISPR immunity Yuan and colleagues reveal that type II CRISPR-Cas systems dominate the human gut, and diverse gut phage-encoded anti-CRISPR (Acr) proteins target these systems. They identify a widespread family, Gut...

Gut phage Acrs

Type II CRISPR-Cas systems dominate human gut w/diverse phage Acrs targeting these systems. Widespread family, GutAcraca, adopts similar structures to inhibit Cas9 & regulate its own expression, highlighting phage adaptation to gut ecology
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

as a proud parent, yes

Simultaneous inhibition of bacterial virulence and anti-phage defense systems by synergistic bacteriophage counter-defense proteins - The EMBO Journal Bacteriophages have evolved diverse inhibitors targeting key bacterial processes, including virulence and anti-phage defense systems, which could inspire novel antimicrobial strategies and enhance pha...

Simultaneous inhibition of bacterial virulence & anti-phage defense by synergistic bacteriophage counter-defense proteins:
Shuai Le, Haihua Liang et al show how Dap2 sequesters T3SS activators & prevents Pseudomonas host from inactivating a key phage endonuclease
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Congrats Dina, what an amazing group of new fellows!

Structural and functional diversity of toxin-antitoxin-chaperone systems Toxin-antitoxin-chaperone (TAC) systems are three-part gene clusters encoding a toxin, antitoxin, and specialized SecB-like chaperone (SecBTA) with em…

Had a bit of a break from the socials and forgot my Bluesky password, but really happy to belatedly share some great work from PhD student Jose Nakamoto on the diversity of toxin-antitoxin-chaperone systems
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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

Our lab is excited to share unpublished research on phage defense at the upcoming 2026 Symposium on the Immune System of Bacteria!

Today is the last day for abstract submissions: sisb2026.rockefeller.edu

Thank you to Marraffini @naamaaviram.bsky.social Seed @jbdsf.bsky.social labs for organizing!

New preprint: Cyclic tri-adenylate signalling by a Panoptes anti-phage guard system with a CARF-TM effector. Great work led by Sabine Grüschow
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Highly mutagenic continuous evolution in E. coli using a Φ29-based orthogonal replication system - Nature Biotechnology Mutational rates of bacterial evolution are increased using an error-prone orthogonal system.

#NatMicroPicks

Sending evolution into overdrive 🔧🦠

A Φ29‑based DNA replication system in E. coli enables stable and targeted hypermutation achieving evolution of enzyme activities within days

#MicroSky

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

2 year fellowship available in AMR research www.medicalresearchfoundation.org.uk/grants/antim...