Checkout our latest preprint which is a real lab-wide effort to map antibiotic stress signatures across the pneumococcal pangenome. All findings have also been incorporated in PneumoBrowse 2.0.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hey #Microsky, time to celebrate your amazing female colleagues, students and mentors for #IWD2026! Nominate an inspiring woman whose research, teaching, innovation, or community leadership deserves recognition! @femsmicro.org crm.fems-microbiology.org/ssp/internat...

Protecting double Holliday junctions ensures crossing over during meiosis - Nature Conditional ablation experiments show that key components of the synaptonemal complex protect double Holliday junction recombination intermediates to ensure their resolution into crossover products, which are required for accurate chromosome segregation during meiosis.

Fantastic work coming out of Neil Hunter’s lab! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

PhD & Postdoc Positions at the Dept of Microbial Population Biology of the MPI for Evolutionary Biology (Plön, Germany) to work on jumbo phages & HGT of genomic islands. An amazing research team led by the one and only Paul Rainey, one of the most hard-core evolutionary micro/biologists of our time!

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...
Two Postdoctoral Research Associates in the Molecular Analysis of Bacterial Outer Membrane Protein Biogenesis

BEN BERKS lab 🤩

Mechanism and reconstitution of circadian transcription in cyanobacteria - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Fang et al. reveal how a bacterial circadian clock turns genes on and off at the right times of day and use the purified proteins to drive circadian gene transcription in a test tube for days.

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

Our latest preprint: Together with the team of Jan Löwe, @danieltamarit.bsky.social and many others we discovered and characterized several Asgard tubulin genes and propose that microtubule architecture and dynamics evolved in Asgard archaea prior to eukaryogenesis
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A non-catalytic role for RFC in PCNA-mediated processive DNA synthesis The RFC clamp loader remains associated with PCNA beyond the loading step, supporting processive DNA replication by stabilizing the inherently unstable PCNA-polymerase ẟ complex.

Nice to see some yeast genetics in a Cell paper, where the authors test models based on single-molecule in vitro analysis. The combination of genetics and biochemistry often addresses questions most effectively.
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

A really nice story, congratulations!

In our most recent work David Forrest has discovered a widespread mechanisms linking transcription initiation to DNA supercoiling...

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

Dynamic DnaA–DnaB interactions at oriC coordinate the loading and coupled translocation of two DnaB helicases for bidirectional replication Abstract. Bidirectional replication is a conserved principle requiring coordinated translocation of the two replicative helicases loaded at the origin. In

Dynamic DnaA–DnaB interactions at oriC coordinate the loading and coupled translocation of two DnaB helicases for bidirectional replication url: academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Microbial metal-head: the integrated roles of metal homeostasis in host-pathogen interaction at Newcastle University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Microbial metal-head: the integrated roles of metal homeostasis in host-pathogen interaction at Newcastle University, listed on FindAPhD.com

PhD position available in our team to study how UPEC exploits metals to successfully colonise the host gut. Cool collaboration with @thecopperdoctor.bsky.social and @banzhaflab.bsky.social Please share and get in touch for more details

Characterising antibacterial toxins in the food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes at Newcastle University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Characterising antibacterial toxins in the food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes at Newcastle University, listed on FindAPhD.com

www.findaphd.com/phds/project... interested in bacterial antagonism? PhD opportunity in our team, see below. Please repost!

Exploiting the bacterial DNA damage response as an alternative antimicrobial at Newcastle University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Exploiting the bacterial DNA damage response as an alternative antimicrobial at Newcastle University, listed on FindAPhD.com

E. coli is the leading bacterium causing death from AMR infections worldwide. If you'd like to explore approaches to exploit the DNA damage response as alternative antimicrobial, please apply to the following PhD studentship available in my lab starting October 2026: www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

An anti-CRISPR targets the sgRNA to block Cas9 and guides the design of enhanced genome editors - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Yu, Yin, Zhu, Lu and colleagues show that Acr inhibits Cas activity through a scaffold RNA interaction and further develop an RNA truncation optimization strategy to enhance editing performance.

Beautiful work with big implications for the future of Cas9-type technologies
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Recombinational repair is the major pathway required to reload the bacterial replicative helicase following introduction of single-strand DNA breaks. A great way to end the year! Big thank you to co-authors from the @heathmurraylab.bsky.social

Conflicts between the DNA replication and repair machineries promote cell death in Gram-positive bacteria Cellular proliferation relies on the successful coordination and completion of genome replication and segregation. To help achieve this, many bacteria utilize regulatory pathways that ensure DNA repli...

Congratulations to Hannah and colleagues for depicting the consequences of DNA replication hyper-initiation in Gram-positive bacteria! @microbiologysociety.org www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Structurally heterogeneous ribosomes cooperate in protein synthesis in bacterial cells - Nature Communications Cells can simultaneously produce structurally dissimilar ribosomes, suggesting functional specialization of distinct ribosome populations. Here, the authors show that distinct ribosomes cooperate rath...

New cryo-EM/ET story - a brilliant collaboration with Sergey Melnikov's lab in Newcastle @sergeymelnikov.bsky.social and Stefan Pfeffer's lab in Heidelberg @pfeffercryolab.bsky.social. Great work in particular by Karla Helena-Bueno and @sophiekopetschke.bsky.social

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

Still time to apply and join my team on a fully funded PhD project looking at dynamics of the bacterial DNA damage response in live cells using genomics.

Structure and Activation Mechanism of a Lamassu Phage Defence System Lamassu is a diverse family of defence systems that protect bacteria, including pandemic strains of Vibrio cholerae, against phage infection. They target essential cellular processes, aborting infecti...

This was a fantastic collaboration with our neighbors @mblokesch.bsky.social & David Adams and Mark Szczelkun and @steven-shaw.bsky.social in Bristol. Special thanks to the DCI for invaluable support with cryo-EM of a rather difficult target! @drhonsworth.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

With a very big thank you to Heath from @heathmurraylab.bsky.social who has been an incredible mentor over the years and offered me amazing support throughout my journey towards research independence

Beautiful work from the Dewar lab and colleagues diving into replication fork rescue in vertebrates. Together, our papers highlight critical similarities/differences in DNA damage repair processes occurring in prokaryotes vs eukaryotes when the replisome encounters a single-strand discontinuity.

Rescuing bacterial genome replication: essential functions to repair a double-strand break and restart DNA synthesis Many antibiotics indirectly generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) that can damage bacterial genomes. Oxidised nucleobases become genotoxic when they are targeted for repair through excision, generati...

Excited to share with you the story that enabled me to start my own lab: what happens when the bacterial DNA replication machinery encounters single-strand discontinuities on template DNA? What is required for break repair and replication restart?
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...