A drawing of fruit flies eating and laying eggs in a mix of clean and pathogen-contaminated substrates.
This pre-printed article discusses insect oviposition as a tractable, mechanistically grounded model for behavioural immunity, linking individual egg-laying decisions to population level disease dynamics.
🪰🦠
doi.org/10.32942/X2W...
Interested in #virulence? Not sure what it is - or how to explain it? Just curious? 🧐🦠🧬🦋
@kayla-king.bsky.social and I just wrote a Primer for @currentbiology.bsky.social on the ecology and evolution of virulence!
Check it below and share :)
#MicroSky #EvoSky #pathogens
New research finds that sleeping fruit fly brains respond to sensory stimuli just like vertebrates, pointing to evolutionarily conserved neural signatures of sleep.
By @siddhantpusdekar.bsky.social
#neuroskyence
www.thetransmitter.org/sleep/drosop...
A screencapture of the page dedicated to the transcription factor isl1/tailup. There is information about the flybase ID, function, classification, keywords, and a very long wall of text under BIOLOGICAL OVERVIEW. Fly people rock tbh
The Interactive Fly logo, showing a cartoon of two adult Drosophila melanogaster on a yellow background. There's subtext that reads "A cyberspace guide to Drosophila development and metazoan evolution".
Did you know? 🧪 "The Interactive Fly" is a wonderful website hosted by @socdevbio.bsky.social where you can learn about their development, the history of gene discovery/name, and it is full of super useful resources for the #DevBio community 🪰https://www.sdbonline.org/sites/fly/aimain/1aahome.htm
The final piece in a 27-year fly immunity puzzle.
Yao describes "Paillotin" (Pai), the name given to #Drosophila "IM18." With this paper, all 24 Immune-induced Molecules (IMs) from Uttenweiler-Joseph et al. (1998) have been named & characterized. 🎊
Pai is an HDP conserved across fly 🪰 species
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Jewelna Akorli is a Principal Investigator and Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellow at the University of Ghana. Her work centers on mosquito-associated endosymbionts and variations in vector competence in natural mosquito populations.
📢 Meet the speakers of the 2025 SymbNET Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses gimm.idloom.events/phd-summer-s... 👉 Know more about Jewelna: noguchi.ug.edu.gh/fellows/dr-j...
#SymbioSky #MicroSky
SymbNET PhD Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses 2025 with great lecturers:
J. Akorli,
@berasymbionts.bsky.social,
M. Blaser,
T. Bosch,
@nicoledubilier.bsky.social,
@fkttkm.bsky.social,
I. Gabanyi,
G. Dominguez-Bello,
and... 1/2
#SymbioSky #MicroSky gimm.idloom.events/phd-summer-s...
Time to give an update on the fantastic work by @taniafpaulo.bsky.social during her PhD, now published in @royalsocietypublishing.org on the evolution of resistance and disease tolerance mechanisms to oral infection in #Drosophila
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
#infection #immunity 🤓🎊
A photo of a young Lilian Vaughan Morgan, sitting with a book on her lab staring into the distance.
A photo of an older Lilian Vaughan Morgan, sitting at a lab bench with a microscope and dozens of glass milk bottles bunged with cotton. Lilian is in the middle of applying ether to anaesthetize a bottle of flies.
This #InternationalWomensDay I want to tell the story of Lilian Vaughan Morgan. I learned of Lilian this past year - what a badass.
Lilian was a leading scientist when women weren't welcome in the lab, nor even the department. But she contributed immensely to the genetics of sex determination
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The strain on scientific publishing: we set out to characterise the remarkable growth of the scientific literature in the last few years, in spite of declining growth in total scientists. What is going on?
direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A 🧵 1/n
#AcademicSky #PhDchat #ScientificPublishing #SciPub
PhD Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses. Awesome topic. Unbeatable location.
#symbiosky #microsky #evobio
gimm.idloom.events/phd-summer-s...
Workshop on ecological & evolutionary immunology/insect immunity. 15-19th Sept 2025 - Werbellinsee, Germany, organised by Sophie Armitage and Jens Rolff. Abstract deadline start of March www.bcp.fu-berlin.de/en/biologie/...
German and US flags
To US colleagues who have lost or are in imminent danger of losing their jobs: please DM whether we can accommodate your research.
(5/5)
Special thanks to Sucena Lab at #FCUL (ce3c) for all the discussions and especially to co-authors Tânia Paulo and Elvira Lafuente for their incredible work to put this story out there!
(4/5)
We expect this experimental framework will prove useful in disentangling the relative roles of #diseasetolerance (to pathogen-induced damage) and #resistance during infections, not only in this #host-#pathogen system but across different species
(3/5)
We show that this treatment displays #sexualdimorphism in survival and reduces #fecundity, with both effects heavily influenced by:
1) length of exposure, and
2) Pathogen #virulence
(2/5)
We show that feeding on heat-killed P. entomophila leads to high #fitness costs in Drosophila! 😯
We took advantage of this approach and assessed both survival and reproductive output and discovered both to be deeply impacted by #pathogen-induced #tissue #damage.
I am very happy to see this first part of my PhD work go online now! 💃🏾 We explored alternative strategies to elicit #diseasetolerance in #Drosophila melanogaster in response to oral #infection with a natural bacterial #pathogen, #Pseudomonas entomophila. (Thread)
'The problem is compounded by the matter of communication. Science is nuanced. New evidence often complicates established research findings, experts disagree over what lessons to draw from the evidence, and news outlets favor eye-catching studies over rigorous methodology.'
Experimental evolution of a pathogen confronted with innate immune memory increases variation in virulence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12....
Is it more than malaria?
Hemorrhagic fever concerns resurface in panzi, DRC outbreak.
apnews.com/article/cong...
"What makes a super-spreader? Unravelling the genetics of host infectiousness"
Funded #PhD position in my lab exploring the drivers of host heterogeneity in pathogen transmission. Get in touch if interested. Deadline 17 Jan 2025.
#HostPathogen #DiseaseEcology
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Fresh off the press, our work on wing deployment in Drosophila 🪰:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Work by: Simon Hadjaje, Ignacio Andrade-Silva, Marie-Julie Dalbe and Raphaël Clément
Grmai, L., Michaca, M., Lackner, E., Nampoothiri, V. P. N., Vasudevan, D. (2024). Integrated stress response signaling acts as a metabolic sensor in fat tissues to regulate oocyte maturation and ovulation. Cell Rep, 43(3):113863 www.cell.com/cell-reports...
The birth of fruit fly's central nervous system imaged with multicolor #adaptive #lightsheet microscopy. The microscope self-aligns to a signal that appears during imaging.
www.nature.com/articles/nbt...
Keeping your symbiosis genes on a plasmid is a smart move if you have multiple potential hosts. Here a gut bacterial symbiont, but same is true for N-fixing Rhizobia.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Drosophila and Lactiplantibacillus plantarum in the spotlight (again), what a wonderful model (disclaimer I am biased ;-) ).
Congrats Will and team!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
#Fruitfly, Darmn autocorrect! 😑
Remind me again, why are there no emojis for the fruity? 😟 #drosophila #modelorganism #Nobelprize
Dear grad students,
Don’t go into the lab tomorrow. Put the thesis away. That data analysis can wait too. Spend time with your loved ones/take a day of rest. The science will be there when you get back.
Sincerely,
A retired grad student
