Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.

We've been we've been working on this for quite a while now (hopefully published soon). Grateful to @proftracypalmer.bsky.social for concinving me & @lislowe.bsky.social that mycobacteria produce inter-bacterial toxins. Team science, led by @sambenedict5.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis as a model system | Journal of Bacteriology We are thrilled to contribute an installment in this series on microbial model systems to the Journal of Bacteriology. In launching this series (1), the editors envisioned that each installment could serve as an introduction to a field for the major bacterial model systems. In this sense, writing this installment on Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) presents some great opportunities and some challenges. There are already two excellent installments in this series covering Mycobacterium smegmatis (2) and Mycobacterium marinum (3), and we refer the reader to these reviews for related insights on the use of these mycobacteria as models. The most substantive challenge is to define how M. tuberculosis is a model, and what is it a model for? In considering these challenges, we have chosen to highlight several different interpretations of “M. tuberculosis as model.” We first consider M. tuberculosis as a model system for prokaryotic biology and emphasize the areas for which the study of Mtb has expanded prokaryotic dogmas established from the earlier model systems of Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. Second, we consider experimental systems that seek to model the pathogenesis of tuberculosis as a human disease. As an obligate human pathogen, all attempts to use surrogate systems are ultimately imperfect models of the human infection. Finally, we highlight the ways in which M. tuberculosis, as a global pathogen with massive disease burden but little commercial interest in therapeutic development, has been a model for public-private partnerships in drug and diagnostic development, with notable successes that can be a model for other fields. Common to all of these interpretations of “Mtb as model” are two inescapable microbiologic features that impact all experimental work with Mtb: its slow growth rate and its requirement for BSL3 containment. Due to the nature of the broad scope of biology covered in this review, we apologize for our inability to cite all the excellent work that our field has contributed to the bacteriology literature over the past decades.

It was a Glickman Lab team effort with Emilee Barnard, Maria Elgrail, Allison Fay, and Yaprak Ozakman. For me, reviewing the progress in our field was awe inspiring. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

To be clear: If you funnel thousands of scientists into a massive, broad grant pool, but use "agency priorities" or geography to decide who actually gets the money, it's true that bottom-up science becomes top-down quickly

Both are true: fewer targeted NOFOs, more political influence on grants

A potential role for acyl-phosphate in the coordination of phospholipid and lipopolysaccharide synthesis in Escherichia coli www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

I’m pleased 🤗 to share our new preprint exploring the mode of action and resistance of the antitubercular drug pyrazinamide (PZA) 💊 Thanks to everyone who have participated 🙌
We hope these findings will help the fight against drug resistance in tuberculosis.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Great new story from Sophie Helaine and Molly Sargen!

www.helainelab.com

The vault associates with membranes in situ The eukaryotic vault particle is a giant ribonucleoprotein complex that assembles into an iconic barrel-like cage. Its cellular function has remained elusive despite extensive characterization. Using ...

Vaults. They are cell biology's greatest puzzle! This preprint from Martin Beck's lab shows them docked on ER membranes with a ribosome inside. What on earth is going on there??

#CellBiology #WTFology

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Holy cow the Zhou lab at UCLA is cooking with Isonet 2 - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Averaging-free direct visualization of ribosome translational state! #teamtomo #cryoet

Identification of sporulation genes in Bacillus anthracis highlights similarities and significant differences with Bacillus subtilis How good is Bacillus subtilis as a model for the spore-forming pathogen Bacillus anthracis? Using high throughput genetics to identify B. anthracis sporulation genes and cytological analysis of the mu...

Fer’s tour de force in B. anthracis is out! Fer got Tn-seq running, built an ordered knockout library, defined all essential sporulation genes, and found a peptidoglycan deacetylase inhibitor critical for engulfment. Including our first one-by-all Alphafold screen! journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Proteome-wide in silico screening for human protein-protein interactions Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) drive virtually all biological processes, yet most PPIs have not been identified and even more remain structurally unresolved. We developed a two-step computational...

Thrilled to share that the final piece of my PhD work is now on bioRxiv! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... With support from @nvidia and the @NSF, we used AlphaFold to screen 1.6M+ protein pairs, revealing thousands of potential novel PPIs. All data can be viewed at predictomes.org/hp

Cyclic-di-AMP modulates cellular turgor in response to defects in bacterial cell wall synthesis - Nature Microbiology Brogan et al. uncover a signalling pathway in which levels of the nucleotide second messenger c-di-AMP increase in response to defects in cell wall synthesis. This regulatory pathway decreases turgor ...

Very happy to share that a large part of my thesis work is out today: B. subtilis uses the second messenger c-di-AMP to modulate its turgor pressure in response to the state of its cell envelope. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Johns Hopkins pauses pay increases, freezes hiring amid federal cuts The Johns Hopkins University will freeze staff hiring and pay increases as it deals with federal funding losses

BREAKING: Amid more federal funding and research cuts, Johns Hopkins University is pausing pay increases, freezing staff hiring and reducing capital projects by up to 20%. The university is on track to lose nearly $1 billion in funding — so far. Read:
www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/hi...

Harvard today, your institution tomorrow.

It's all part of the Project 2025 plan to destroy high education in America.

All leading US universities depend on federal funding and tuition dollars from international students. They severely curtailed the former. Now they're eliminating the latter.

‘A bloodbath’: Trump administration moves to terminate hundreds of federal grants at Harvard - The Boston Globe Harvard researchers who rely on federal grants to study cancer, infectious diseases, and a range of other topics began receiving termination notices en masse on Thursday from a number of federal agenc...

All funding has been cut. I don’t think the general public has fully absorbed the sheer scale of Trump’s illegal attacks on scientific research at Harvard. “A bloodbath - Entire labs are unraveling, and young scientists on training grants may be suddenly adrift.”

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/16/m...

We all got this email at ~6:45pm today... it's bleak :/

Columbia University lays off nearly 180 researchers due to Trump funding cuts Columbia University said on Tuesday it was laying off dozens of researchers whose work was funded by U.S. government grants and contracts that President Donald Trump's administration canceled in March, citing antisemitic harassment on and near campus.

Columbia University lays off nearly 180 researchers due to Trump funding cuts reut.rs/42Mj77t

UMASS IS RESCINDING ALL GRAD POSITIONS FOR THIS YEAR

Amid Trump’s funding threats, Harvard freezes hiring - The Boston Globe Harvard cited “substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies.”

Hiring (and salary) freeze at Harvard. That's going to spread far beyond elite universities. Every time I see something like this I think of the administrators who thought they could duck, the "apolitical" faculty who couldn't be bothered, the radicals who can see only one issue at a time.

Stand up for Science March 7th flyer with more info at standupforscience2025.org

An initiative led by brave graduate students and leaders to fight for science!

NIH slashes overhead payments for research, sparking outrage Move to cut indirect cost rate to 15% could cost universities billions of dollars

Here's our story from @davidmalakoff.bsky.social on the NIH indirect bombshell. Hang in there, everybody. www.science.org/content/arti...

image of a blue/green ribbon-like pattern with a black background, with the text “November was your Royalcore Sad Classical Dark Academia moment” - from my Spotify Wrapped

otherwise known as the final year of a Ph.D.

Hi! Would love to be added to the list :) Thank you!

Bacterial cell surface starter pack !

Trying to make it easier to find people with the same love for bacterial membranes and whatever goes in and through them.

Leave a comment if you want to be added

go.bsky.app/KfHSqvt