Anyway: highly recommended.

I saw some scientific discussions about the inaccuracies in Project Hail Mary.
However, the worst script mistake is that you'd graduate a Ph.D. in molecular biology and look like Ryan Gosling in the end.

A study by Cote and Cascales labs shows that adhesins trigger microcolony formation which confer resistance against a broad range of short-range contact-dependent weapons (e.g. T6SS, T4SS, CDI) but not against long-range diffusible weapons.
@cascaleslab.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Today is World Homeopathy Day.

In its honor, let’s remember that time The Amazing James Randi overdosed on homeopathy and lived to tell about it.

I love it when the mountain in the background is actually in altitude 98m below sea level (Mt. Izrach), Judea desert.
And lots of wild flowers after a rainy spring.
With @idane.bsky.social and other friends

Wow

Planet Earth is blue?!
And there is nothing I can do

One month later I can agree that this post aged quite badly

Nicotine was first isolated in 1828.
It took **nearly 200 years** to complete the nicotine biosynthesis pathway.
The authors reconstituted this metabolon both in vitro and heterologously in vivo.
A pea expressing the genes became insecticidal to Spodoptera larvae.
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Amazing, team Vivek

I tought it's George Church

One day someone will rigorously quantify the % of carbon exuded to the soil by different plant roots.
Until the time comes we will keep throwing imaginary numbers to the air, ranging between 10% to 40%.

לא. נחל חמר. מדורג אצלי בתור השטפון הכי יפה בארץ בגלל שהוא יוצא חזק מפתח קטן. 'גיליתי' אותו במקרה בחורף לפני שנתיים אחרי שעקבתי אחרי הנהר הזורם. אבל צריך ללכת איזה 6-7 קמ או ג'יפ בדרך קשוחה להגיע למפל.

Southern Judea desert gets 100-150 mm of rain annually but if you're lucky enough you get to see the water in a stunning powerful flash flood. This year Nakhal Khemar was flooding two days in a row.

RIP J. Michael Bishop, discoverer of the 1st human oncogene, c-Src. A gene that is being activated in many cancers.

excellent!

Escapism from war

Great fun presenting some of our research @otagomicroimmuno.bsky.social @universityofotago.bsky.social
Including transposon mutagenesis of phages.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Arabinose isn't only an inducer!

@peterfineran.bsky.social gave a talk in our Hebrew Univ. microbiology journal club and mentioned his recent amazing finding that some phages add up to 3 arabinoses (!!) to their DNA to evade bacterial defense.

Mahler et al. CHM 2025
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

1/11 🔥 New preprint alert 🔥
We wanted to know what plants in the wild really care about. So we asked them 🎤.
Here is what we learned: “Biotic-response networks are an important organizer of the transcriptome in wild Arabidopsis thaliana populations”
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The good news is that we own Najaf.”

He asked, “What’s the bad news?”

I replied, “We own Najaf. What do you want us to do with it?”

a city of about 400,000-500,000 people then, and the holiest city in Shia Islam.

After several days of fighting, the enemy collapsed and melted away. We took control of the city, and I go on the radio. I called my boss and said, “Hey, boss, I’ve got good news and bad news.

David Petraeus (former CIA director and a US retired general):

"When I was a two-star general and commander of the great 101st Airborne Division in the early days of the fight to Baghdad, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where we were ordered to take the city of Najaf,

Plasmids promote antimicrobial resistance through insertion sequence-mediated gene inactivation - Nature Microbiology Inactivation of chromosomal genes through plasmid-encoded IS elements is an extended mechanism of antimicrobial resistance evolution in bacteria.

Final version of our last paper is out!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

One thing that was not mentioned in this profile paper about Prof. Yang Bai is how nice, generous, and modest he is, in addition to his enormous scientific talent. A true mensch.

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/THJIYP...

Important work in plant genomics by my good friend Idan Efroni in collab with the Zach Lippman

Genious

Alecia Speter from UNC gave a cool talk in our microbiology journal club about bacteria that she samples from the Ampullae of Lorenzini (organs that detect electrical fields) in various Atlantic Sharks.

Hopefully this can be corrected in the future.
We have no reason for a conflict with Iranians, and also Lebanese and Syrian people.