Finally published. Many thanks to a wonderful collaborative team and scientific platforms!!! And thanks to editors and reviewers for enthusiasm and a great review.

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

Very cool, happy to see it out!

No enough drink for jokes

01, April

Pizza gratis!

I am educated by human beings, so I am actually an AI...

Capturing dynamic phage–pathogen coevolution by clinical surveillance @nature.com @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Description Please note that job descriptions are not exhaustive, and you may be asked to take on additional duties that align with the key responsibilities ment...

Please RT:📢We are hiring a Post-Doc in Structural Biology to join our multidisciplinary team.

Project: study molecular mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer using cryo-EM and integrative structural biology.

Apply: shorturl.at/ecrVL

#StructuralBiology #CryoEM #Postdoc

This is the first time we observed bacteria use plasmolysis to defence against phages! biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thanks all the authors to discover this together! @fnobrega.bsky.social Zhiying @garushyants.bsky.social Dinshaw and Eugene

I finally read the paper overnight and found it is really good and worthy to read. Thank you Thomas.

What does that mean?

Jumbo phage–mediated transduction of genomic islands | PNAS Bacteria acquire new genes by horizontal gene transfer, typically mediated by mobile genetic elements (MGEs). While plasmids, bacteriophages, and c...

#phagesky jumbo #phage -mediated HGT

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🤟🤟🤟🤟🤟

Come and work with me and @ariannebabina.bsky.social on #Streptomyces evolution and antibiotic production

Origins of a tangled bank: Adaptation and evolution in antibiotic-producing Streptomyces

www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate...

please repost

🔥🔥🔥

Congrats!!

Phage "satellites" that produce capsids but have no genes to produce tails have puzzled scientists for a long time. These are abundant as prophages in bacteria, but it was unclear how they can infect without tails

Now, Penadés & co show that they hijack tails from other phages. Incredible!

Thank you Joao!

(Ph)ighting Phages: How Bacteria Resist Their Parasites Bacteria are threatened by viral attack in every environment they colonize. For more than 100 years, microbiologists have investigated the mechanisms in place to contain these attacks. Rostøl and Marr...

😃

www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

😉Thank you Aisling!

😊Thank you Nuria!

Chimeric infective particles expand species boundaries in phage-inducible chromosomal island mobilization Capsid-forming PICIs (cf-PICIs) produce their own capsids and exploit phage tails from unrelated species to transfer their DNA across bacterial hosts. This tail piracy enables broad dissemination and ...

A big thank you for everyone involved Jinlong,
@alfredfisa.bsky.social, Laura and Christopher. For more details, plz read www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Finally, we demonstrated evolutionary homology between cf-PICI and phage HK97 capsids, while showing that cf-PICIs avoid interference during capsid assembly through finely tuned interactions, thereby ensuring efficient and specific packaging of their own DNA. @jonaszpatkowski.bsky.social

In addition, we identified adaptor and connector genes as central to capsid–tail chimeric assembly, with high variability during the evolution of tail-less capsids.

This uncovers unexpected complexity in phage–satellite interactions, challenging the long-held view that satellites rely on a single helper phage to complete their lifecycle.

We revealed a key feature of tail piracy: cf-PICIs can exploit multiple helper phages—one inducing their cycle, another supplying tails. Remarkably, cf-PICIs can even accumulate tail-less particles without helper phage induction, and factors causing cell lysis can release them.

We discovered a new horizontal gene transfer mechanism: tail-less cf-PICIs hijack free phage tails extracellularly, forming infectious chimeric virions that drive both intra- and inter-species transfer among bacteria. @jonaszpatkowski.bsky.social @tcostalab.bsky.social @jrpenades.bsky.social

Did you get the email I sent 😭

Picking blueberries 💙🐦

The prototypic crAssphage is a linear phage-plasmid Schmidtke et al. demonstrate that C. communis, a ubiquitous human gut phage that evades conventional plaque-based isolation, predominately replicates as a low-copy linear phage-plasmid with a broad ho...

#phagesky

www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...