New Preprint 📢 from our team 🔎 Critical assessment of #intratumor and #low #biomass #microbiome using #longread sequencing
Some studies suggest bacteria 🦠 live inside tumors and influence cancer treatment. But there’s also been a major #debate: in these very low-microbe tissue samples, how much 1/
Very pleased this is now published - led by Dr Emily Connell & @dvauzour.bsky.social, we show that a Mediterranean diet-inspired supplement can improve disease signs in an Alzheimer's mouse model, acting via the gut microbiota www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
🧪🧠 #gutbrainaxis #meddiet
Our paper "Ecosystem health shapes viral ecology in peatland soils" is out in Nature Microbiology!
We show that peatland health strongly structures viral communities, shaping virus–host networks, and carbon and nutrient cycling. Please share.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#phagesky #Microsky
Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Proud to be part of this incredible multidisciplinary team uncovering why some people are NOT infected by Salmonella. This new Wellcome Trust @wellcometrust.bsky.social funding will allow us to uncover why some people naturally resist infection and colonisation by Salmonella Typhimurium.
Why can our farts ignite? Time to find out (and quite a bit more) in our new paper in Nature Microbiology led by the amazing Dr Cait Welsh. Integrating atomic-to-ecosystem level insights. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New paper: Dried soil bacteria enter dormancy with "frozen" RNA & metabolite profiles—but water vapor alone can wake them up!
#Microbiology #SoilScience #Dormancy #ClimateChange #MicroSky
Very excited to share the latest work from our lab, which was published today in Nature!
nature.com/articles/s41...
PhD graduate and now post-doc Sofia Dahlman, along with co-senior author Sam Forster from The Hudson and other researchers from our lab and others.
Good news: a grant I submitted got selected for an interview out of ~150 apps. Only 2 others got interviews!
Bad news: @skypeascientist.bsky.social was not selected in the end 😞
I will keep trying.
In the meantime, consider supporting our work with $5-10/month?
givebutter.com/SupportSAS25
Selfie of 5 smiling women at the CSU Chancellor's Office board room
Becket Lab representing at @csucoast.bsky.social annual meeting! 💪
☕🍏 Coffee break time at 'The human microbiome' symposium! #EESMicrobiome
Microbes never sleep, but scientists definitely need their coffee 😅 A perfect chance to recharge, chat, and maybe spark the next big collaboration over a fresh cup ✨
Big day for multiple lab members who celebrated a promotion! Congrats to Apoorva Uboveja for promotion to Staff Scientist and Aidan Cole for starting as a postdoc! I am now a full professor too 🤓 Want to learn more about our science or join the lab? Visit Airdlab.com
Trainees eating shrimp boil
Picking food
Shrimp boil
Preparing shrimp boil
The weather held up for our lab shrimp boil. We gorged on delicious food, chatted leisurely over fire. I am fortunate to have these awesome trainees 🥹
The Zahn lab is transitioning into the TIDAL Lab this Fall and moving to the Appl. Sci. Department at William & Mary.
Would love to chat with students interested in doing a PhD at the nexus of microbial ecology and data science (starting 2026).
RP please!
gzahn.github.io
The goal of a PhD is not to learn some facts or read a few papers or learn a bunch of techniques. The goal of a PhD is to learn independence, problem solving, how to finish things you start, resilience, & gain the ability to adapt & think creatively. Learning these things is hard.
At a symposium where I'm one of the only PUI faculty and I've just been playing therapist to super kind and well-meaning R1 faculty to get them to not 👏take👏mentee👏behavior👏personally👏. 1/n
This week we said farewell to the amazing @caitlinkowa.bsky.social as she moves to start her new lab at Dartmouth. So grateful for all her leadership and mentoring the last few years.
If you’re interested in all things skin microbes (especially fungi) check out her lab! I can’t recommend enough.
Left: Compound-promoter interaction network. Fifty-three significant compound-promoter interactions are shown as edges in a Sankey diagram connecting the compounds (left, source nodes) to the promoters (right, target nodes). Edge thickness represents mean Z-scores (n = 8), while node size represents the total number of interactions. Right: Proposed model for the molecular mechanism of caffeine-ciprofloxacin antagonism. Caffeine triggers expression of MicF small RNA in a Rob-dependent manner, which then binds to the 5′-UTR of ompF mRNA to inhibit and decrease OmpF protein levels. This ultimately prevents ciprofloxacin from entering the cell, resulting in caffeine-ciprofloxacin antagonism
How are bacterial transport machineries regulated by external cues? @brochadolab.bsky.social &co identify environmental chemicals that regulate #transporter transcription, identifying the TF Rob as a key modulator of #EffluxPump expression in #Ecoli #AMR @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/46pUM9Q
The Summit on Microbiome Stewardship is happening this week!!!
Program details and free registration can be found here. Please note, the webinars and the workshop each require registration to help us manage attendance. Who should attend? Students, and professionals from any discipline, are…
What determines who a phage can infect?
We tackled this question for temperate phages of Klebsiella — a bacterial pathogen — using a genome-wide association study (GWAS) and a massive protein testing effort.
👇 A thread!
List of 30 CloneFISH cultures available for free (requester is asked to pay shipping fees).
Manuscript/resource alert #microsky 🦠 My lab offers the community a collection of 30 E. coli (CloneFISH) cultures, each carrying a plasmid for the heterologous expression of a (near) full-length 16S rRNA gene from one of 30 lineages of archaea, including 19 yet uncultured ones.
I think it's important to be able to say: I'm keeping it together but I'm not ok. I can manage, I can laugh, I can live and appreciate life, but I'm not ok. Feelings don't need to be simple.
Big day for the Gurney lab, first paper from the lab is now published. @sczerwinski.bsky.social led this work and answered a simple question does phage steering work when other bacteria are around? Tldr: yes! journals.asm.org/doi/epub/10....
I'm happy to announce the latest release of the GlobDB, available at globdb.org.
The GlobDB is a database of "species dereplicated" microbial genomes, and as of release 226 contains twice the number of species-representative genomes (306,260) than the latest GTDB release.
📣 Happy to share our review on host-microbiome genomics!
We synthesize the growing field exploring interactions between human genetics and the microbiome, building a roadmap for mapping the dialogue between our genes and microbes
Out now in Nature Reviews Genetics👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We have a new 3-year postdoc position in our group at the @hifmb.de to study plasmids and plasmids systems of the marine environment to survey their utility in microbial responses to environmental change.
Please see the official job ad here, and spread the word:
jobs.awi.de/Vacancies/20...
Officially TENURED! 🥳
Grateful to those who supported me along the way – colleagues, collaborators, mentors, students, postdocs and friends. It takes a village and I’m lucky to have mine.
For those that missed it this morning, our paper describing Noodlococcus (and what it has taught us about the evolution and taxonomy of Kocuria rhizophila) is now on BioRxiv
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Incredibly honored to be selected as a @bwfund.bsky.social Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease. Thank you to @bwfund.bsky.social for supporting our work - I am thrilled to join this amazing community! And special thank you to my AMAZING team (past & present) for getting us here!
