What if universities used undergraduates to make biological reagents? No, I don’t mean melting the students. I mean training people in biomanufacturing to reduce research costs. Thread + diagram, hopefully thought-provoking
Excited to share great work from @jingqian.bsky.social , now a second year graduate student in my lab, from research she conducted at her previous position at Shanghai Jiao Tong University!
Excited to share our new paper in @natmed.nature.com ! We evaluated AMR governance across all 193 countries to inform the 2026 Global Action Plan update. A massive collaborative effort - proud to contribute to this critical global health challenge. 🥳
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Interested in developing your skills in microbial 'omics? Consider joining us in Brest 🇫🇷, Oct. 10-24 for two weeks of intensive lectures an tutorial from top faculties and TA! maignienlab.gitlab.io/ebame/
Bonus: beautiful seascape and friendly spirit!
I've long respected Peer Bork's work as top-
tier in the field and always hoped to get to chat with him at a conference someday. Very sad to see this.
Really great answer and thanks for taking the time to respond! I agree a super interesting field and love to see work like the paper you just published making the picture more and more clear over time
Cool paper! Thanks for sharing. As an outside observer I’ve always wondered if the microbes in breast milk could all be from the skin around the nipple (infant oral microbiome + adult skin), or if there’s evidence they’re resident in breast tissue / come from elsewhere. Any thoughts as an expert?
All you want for christmas is.... transposon mutagenesis!
Our new work at @cultivarium.bsky.social screening lots of transposon vectors in lots of bacteria, from @charliegilbert.bsky.social and team.
Transposon and promoter modular parts available on Addgene (pooled library will be there soon too)
Just got back from an incredible trip to Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, where I led a 3-day workshop on microbiome bioinformatics. I was blown away by the students, the research facilities (both on the Karachi campus and at the rural Matiari field site), and the hospitality of my hosts!
📢 New preprint is out on bioRxiv 📢:
How much does virome prep influence our view of the human gut virome?
Short answer: a lot.
Long answer:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Different methods lead to distinct community structures, richness, and major virus-host abundance patterns.
🧵 1/5
Very happy to share our recent work @cultivarium.bsky.social on genetic tools for Ideonella sakaiensis, a (Betaproteo-)bacterium that degrades PET plastic.
We identified a plasmid vector for the strain and generated a large RB-TnSeq library, screening for genes impacting plastic degradation.
A lifehack for turning "non-significant" results into pure gold?
(ICYMI)
statsepi.substack.com/p/one-simple...
The one year anniversary of my arrival at UBC flew by a month ago. Thanks to fellow newPI and former grad school pal @mattolm.bsky.social for reminding me of one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned this past year: *make* time to reflect! Here are some reflections on my first year as a PI & prof… 🧵
Overall, after a year, I’m really happy with where the lab’s at. It feels like we’ve gone from a blank room (and empty hard drive) to a functioning research ecosystem. Can’t wait to start publishing to share our results with the world, and I’m so thankful to all my amazing lab members!
Another surprise is actually the sheer number of meetings. But they’re also more varied and interesting than I expected; a mix of mentoring, working on research problems, and discussing new ideas with potential collaborators all the time.
Work/life balance is also better than I expected. Having a toddler at home probably helps with this though, as I don’t really have the option to work late even if I wanted to! There have only been once or twice where deadlines have forced a short period of late nights and grueling hours.
Transitioning from doing research myself to mentoring others in completing that research has been more challenging than expected, but it’s amazing to get to see data appear without doing any of the hard work of generating it!
Overall it’s a total joy, and in almost every way just as fun as I had hoped it would be 😀. Getting to satisfy my curiosity on a daily basis while contributing to the global scientific enterprise and working with the next generation of scientists is just an incredible way to spend my days.
I have officially been a professor for just over a year! I’ve been reflecting on what this first year has been like and wanted to share a few thoughts on how it compares to the expectations I had when I decided to pursue this career over a decade ago.
My fantastic department at CU Boulder is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor! This is a broad search spanning nearly all areas of biology. Applications are due Nov 13, 2025. Feel free to reach out to me with questions, and please share widely.
jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...
Thanks, @zaminiqbal.bsky.social - very glad to see this out! A great contribution
Wow so impressive!
I reviewed this paper a bit ago and have been waiting for it to come out. A great resource for us Bifidobacteria researchers!
Cool paper, I appreciate how they compare observed vs expected breadth of coverage.
Missing phylogenetics, could be very interesting to genotype and/or assemble some of these pathogens if coverage is high enough
Do people in the same household share strains when they have the same species?
How many cells transmit when a strain is shared?
Can strain composition be dynamic when species composition is stable?
We answer these and related questions for the facial skin microbiome in our latest paper.
🧵[1/10]
I am very happy (and anxious) to share with you our most recent work in which we evaluated four of the most popular long-read assemblers,
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
and tell you just a little bit about it in the following 🧵
Many pregnant women in rural #BurkinaFaso struggle to eat enough to meet the demands of their growing babies. This leads to higher rates of #miscarriage, still- and #preterm birth, and intrauterine growth restriction.
Just yesterday, we published a deep dive into the physiological effects of #BEP supplementation on both mom and baby: rdcu.be/ed5Wb 🥰
Good thread and good accompanying article. The conceptualization of all Alzheimer's research as a monolith of closed minded thought based on fraud is just a myth that doesn't stand up to scrutiny
www.statnews.com/2025/02/14/a...
