Aritz Roa-Eguiara

🚨Preprint! Happy to share the research from my PhD “Genome delivery of a contractile tailed phage and its superinfection exclusion mechanism”. We use cryoEM to study the genome ejection of the phage T4, revealing how the tape measure protein regulates the process. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cover image alert 🎨🚨👇🏼 - check out the amazing drawing of Sophia Zimmermann from our group in Nature Microbiology @natmicrobiol.nature.com ! Fun fact: Sophia initially drew it as a present to Dorentina @humollidorentina.bsky.social when we celebrated her recent paper on TnSeq with phages 🥂😊.

A #WorldPhageDay special shoutout for Sophia Zimmermann's phenomenal phage drawing... and @NatureMicrobiol - fantastic cover. Greetings on the 8th #WorldPhageDay! #ageofthephage #WorldPhageWeek #PhageSky

Super excited to share my postdoctoral work at @imbavienna.bsky.social @viennabiocenter.bsky.social - We discovered that some retrotransposons, or "jumping genes" 🧬, are able to spread from cell to cell via a new viral infectivity route. A short thread: 🧵👇 (1/7)

Very happy to share that HIDEN-SEQ is now out in @natmicrobiol.nature.com! Using this technique, we recapitulated decades of established phage genetics and uncovered new gene functions, including previously unknown anti-defense factors against several defense systems. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Who would not like to start working on bacteriophages after the talk of @aharms485.bsky.social? Brilliant presentation, Alexander!

Great collaboration between @mpimicrobiomarburg.bsky.social and @mpibp.bsky.social solving the structures of CO₂-fixing supercomplexes in methanogens and shedding light on their evolution🧫🔬 #methanogens #methane #StructuralBiology #CryoEM @science.org @maxplanck.de www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check this out! Phage P2 structures and detailed analysis by @vkleinsousa.bsky.social

I'm happy to share one of my favorite projects from the past 4 years. 'Piercing mechanism in the minimal contractile tail of bacteriophage P2'. In this preprint, we applied #cryo-EM, #cryo-ET, TEM, and #computationalbiology to study the #phage P2 virion structure and its contraction mechanism.

Come learn about in-situ CLEM in beautiful Heidelberg! Registration closes October 25th, don’t miss out! @events.embl.org

It's finally published! What a journey @brownlab.bsky.social and I have been on with this one (ask me about it over a pint 🍻). Super excited to be able to say that it's finally out in Trends (author gift link to follow)! 🦠🧫 #phagesky

Sequential assembly in vivo of the bacteriophage P22 genome translocation channel | bioRxiv

Good lord what a triumph/mess. cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...

Thrilled to share my first first-author publication in PLOS Pathogens! 🎉 We structurally characterize a non-tailed vibriophage and describe an unusual symmetry mismatch! Work completed at @carmensmp.bsky.social lab at @cnb-csic.bsky.social Check it out! journals.plos.org/plospathogen... (1/5)

We got an ERC StG! 🥳🎉 Huge thank you to all the people who helped us get here. Five years to explore some Qs we’re very excited about! 🧬🔬

We are thrilled and grateful that our project is funded by #ERCStG via @erc.europa.eu . This will allow us to uncover how the widespread jumbophage killer sensor recognizes the invasion of phiKZ-like jumbophages, which form fascinating vesicle & nucleus compartments during infection.

🎨 Nice tool and great to play with the parameters 🫟

The Great Crested Grebe with her little chicks on her back! Such a great capture!

In situ #CryoEM structures of rice photosystem supercomplexes #photosynthesis #plants #StructuralBiology @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are hosting candidates to apply for a PhD position with a full salary at University of Helsinki. This will be a co-supervised project with the group of Alexander Mühleip to study function, structures and draggability of ER protein translocation in different parasitic organisms.

The passing of Betty Kutter deeply saddens us. Her kindness, generosity, and passion for phages shaped generations of scientists and our entire community. Her legacy lives on through the collaborations and friendships she inspired. Thank you, Betty. We will miss you. 💙

#phagesky #microsky #phage www.cell.com/cell-reports...

@arturocdr.bsky.social always delivering top structural work! Checkout their preprint #phagesky #cryoem

🧬 Thrilled to share our latest @biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social preprint! Here we find that Retron-IX build crazy supramolecular rings scaffolded by DNA molecules that sense phage infection! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Read more below🧵! (1/X)

1/10 🚨Preprint! One RING to rule them all (phages)👑💍⚔️ Bacteria build giant DNA-scaffolded RNase rings (larger than the ribosome!) to shut down viral infection🧬🧵👇 biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

One of the coolest structures presented at the recent SISB2026 meeting, great to see this story from @rafomics.bsky.social and @guillermo-montoya.bsky.social on a giant retron ring-shaped assembly now out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Join us in a fun, crazy and interesting interdisciplinary research project that combines protein biophysics, evolutionary genomics, biomolecular archaeology, and textile research to resolve species identity and post-translational modifications in the structural proteins collagen and keratin

Last dance representing the Taylor group in Prague at #VoM2026 to talk about phages. Impressive setup in a beautiful city and unmatched closure to the PhD journey. Now time to slow down a bit before searching for the next challenge ☀️🫶🏻 #phagesky

New favorite mug - beautiful T4 phage infection design by James Hodgkinson-Bean / @virionapparel.bsky.social 😊☕️🧬

🚨 We're hiring! My new lab at EMBL Hamburg is looking for a Research Technician. I'm looking for someone excited by phages, metabolism, enzymes, structural biology and bacterial immunity—if you know the right person, please share this post!🧵⬇️ Apply here: embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

Interested in joining our group in Oxford? We are looking for a PDRA with single particle Cryo-EM experience to help us figure out how sphingolipids are transported to the cell surface of Gram-negative bacteria. The deadline is 31st July. Informal enquires are welcome. Please share!

We are presenting two posters today at #VOM2026 if you are around and interested: Poster #198: Understanding infection initiation in Burkholderia cenocepacia phage BcepIL02, a Lessievirus encoding multiple tail fibers, and Poster 209: The role of the sim locus in phage P1 superinfection exclusion

The #VOM2026 keynote from @epcrocha.bsky.social was so elegant. How prophages benefit their hosts, how T6SS which is so beneficial to bacteria, evolved from phages, and how most prophages are newcomers.

Interested in a PhD on bacteriophages? Check out www.academictransfer.com/nl/jobs/3623... #phagesky if you are interested and also happen to be at #VOM2026, send me a dm

Thank you to #VoM2026 and all the audience for the impressive setup and nice experience. It was so much fun!! Day one done, four to go!

🔥My first (co)first-author paper is out🔥 The surfaces of Gram+ and Gram- bacteria are markedly different from each other. How are phages equipped to breach the Gram+ envelope❓ 💡We report a baseplate structure uniquely adapted to infect Gram+ S. aureus. A 🧵⬇️ 1/8 #phagesky #cryoEM 🧪

Astonishing

So cool to see the final version of this manuscript! Big baseplate, complex rearrangement, and Gram-positive bacteria 🧫 fun to read! 🤓

Conformational changes of the baseplate regulating tail contraction of Staphylococcus phage 812 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42350675/ #cryoEM

While helping out on a cool genomics project recently, I came to realise I’d been taught a pretty big inaccuracy about the events that occur at fertilization. I suspect that almost everyone reading this has the same misapprehension, so let’s do some learning together: 1/

I see that the NNF Center for Protein Design has finally begun advertising some group leader positions. In case you did not already watch my short video with advice on the topic, here you have it: youtube.com/shorts/hkPxq...

And this journey got to an end: PhD ✅ Thank you to everyone who took part on it along the way and to the committee (Tom Miller, Mark van Raaij and Michela Gambino) for the positive feedback and great discussion. Now time to get ready for VOM2026!!

Hey #TeamTomo, Ever been in need of a tutorial about the fundamentals of cryo-electron tomography? From preprocessing raw frames to high-res subtomogram averaging? That's why @florentwaltz.bsky.social and I made this website! tomoguide.github.io Follow the thread 1 /🧵 #CryoET #CryoEM 🔬🧪

The "Research Day" at our department D-HEST is always caleidoscope of exciting science from food over health to medicine. Phage biotechnology was well represented with Dorentina @humollidorentina.bsky.social and Enea @phagemuffin.bsky.social from our group and the lab of Martin Loessner. 🧫🧬🍻

(1/6) Thrilled to share this story! In our preprint from my PhD in the @kranzuschlab.bsky.social, with help from the Hatfull lab and @soreklab.bsky.social, we discover RyDEP, a phage-encoded RyR-domain glycosidase that allows phages to evade Thoeris defense. Highlights below! doi.org/10.64898/202...

New preprint! 🚨 Phage proteins don't act alone. Phages rely on homooligomerisation to assemble identical protein subunits into functional forms. But figuring out those exact configurations experimentally is tough. Learn about our approach in our new preprint! 👇 (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/6 👻 Something strange in your liquid agar? Who you gonna call? Thermophile hunters. Our new @asm.org #MRA paper reports the complete genome sequence of Geobacillus stearothermophilus strain CS7089 isolated from a commercial agar preparation.

Small fun story from the lab about a slightly crazy rabbit hole or "guess what's living in your agar?" - all the details in the thread by Enea @phagemuffin.bsky.social 👇🏼🔥

Congratulations to @yalemicropath.bsky.social @yalemed.bsky.social researcher @guowangbiao for receiving the poster award at the 11th Annual Yale Biophysics and Structural Biology Symposium! #insitu #cryoEM