Animalcules

🧬🦠 Insect-killing #bacteria produce powerful #antimicrobial compounds, and scientists are investigating how these #microbial #weapons evolve and whether they could inspire new .. #Microbes #Bacteria #AMR #Microsky via interestingengineering .com interestingengineering.com/health/insec...

Woah, this paper found #Klebsiella 🦠 can colonise the gut either as a mono- or mixed-culture (≥2 strains) Mono-cultures more often lead to infection Unclear why ATM My 💰 is on Kp bacteriocin production clearing competitors, enabling blooming #MicroSky journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/msphere.00329-26

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Easy-to-estimate metrics are easy adopted and overextended. Repeatability of protein measurements is a good example: It's useful but not a measure of accuracy. When treated as an accuracy measure, repeatability becomes a problematic benchmark. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Please check out our new work demonstrating how S. aureus integration into the nasal microbiome 👃 can be driven by amino acid availability. This enormous effort was spearheaded by the amazing @laucamus.bsky.social 👩‍🔬!

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

Fantastic paper about the evolution and untapped potential of non-ribosomal peptide synthases. Congrats Georg and team! 👇🏻

Okay this one’s gonna be controversial. In our new preprint, we show that the canonical #Klebsiella pneumoniae 🦠 virulence factors and strain lineage are decoupled from infection severity and patient outcomes. This was a surprise to us #IDSky #KlebClub #MicroSky 🧪 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

Applications of transposon-insertion sequencing for understanding bacterial physiology. Published Open Access and fee-free in MGen using a Publish and Read agreement: https://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.001796 #MGen #PublishAndRead

This work led by @jennbrophy.bsky.social and her lead student Vivian in collaboration with my lab & lead student Michaela published online this morning at Nature Biotechnology www.nature.com/articles/s41... Helps limit engr'd microbial functions to target plants Exciting science & amazing collab

Next up is @vivekmutalik.bsky.social, a staff scientist in the #BioEGSB Division, recognized for Exceptional Achievement in Mid-career Leadership. He's cited for establishing the Phage Foundry (phagefoundry.org) while advancing team science and exemplifying mentorship. Congratulations! 🙌

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✨ Have you read Anna Vagstad's contribution to our 2026 Emerging Investigator's collection? ➡️ Anna presents a promiscuous enzymatic system to rationally produce diverse lipopeptides using enzymes from the kamptornamide RiPP natural product pathway! 🔓 Find it here: doi.org/10.1039/d6cb...

🚨 New paper with @bramvandijk.bsky.social, out now in Genome Biology and Evolution! Why do accessory genes so often hitch a ride on temperate phages? We show that spatial structure alone can tip selection toward a prophage locus over a chromosomal one. doi.org/10.1093/gbe/... 🧵 Two mechanisms:

Visualization of co-transcriptional binding of an E. coli rRNA methyltransferase RsmB and importance of rsmB in cellular fitness. #RNASky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #microsky

Results from Dhirendra Niroula et al. indicate that surfactin synthesized by #Bacillus velezensis DN539 has potential to be developed as a biocontrol agent against broad range of phytobacteria. Learn more: https://doi.org/10.1094/PDIS-11-25-2379-RE #PlantDisease

From hijackers to architects: the role of prophages in bacterial genome evolution journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

Viruses have parasites too. Our new preprint shows how phages use VIPR to silence parasitic satellites, and how the satellites fight back with its own decoy VIPR RNAs that redirect VIPR to DNA REP elements in the host genome!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Very nice discovery from the Jackson, Bravo and Basel labs. Cleaved tRNA ends, loaded with an amino acid, activate a form of bacterial immunity

Global proteolysis during starvation governs proteome remodeling and a survival–regrowth trade-off in bacteria www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... #jcampubs

A synthetic peptide reduced amyloid plaque coverage by 35.6% in mice after eight weeks of treatment. How much of the peptide reaches the brain remains to be measured. doi.org/hcn4zj

This would not surprise me in the least. “I am large and contain multitudes,” as Walt Whitman opined. www.newscientist.com/article/2593...

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The phenotypic landscape of the model firmicute Bacillus subtilis doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Want to run targeted hypermutation in E. coli? You can now order our DGRec plasmids from Addgene: www.addgene.org/browse/artic... We recommend using them in a strain with sbcB and recJ deletions such as this one: www.addgene.org/220588/

Functional mapping and engineering of the Sec translocon unlocked by a cell-free system doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Congratulations to the authors on this very comprehensive study of protein turnover during starvation in E. coli! Definitely worth a read if you care about bacteria living outside of steady state exponential growth (and you should!)

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mGem: Bacterial aversion to making new genes | mBio journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

1/5 Do you use GFP to measure protein abundance? Be very careful. Our new bioRxiv preprint shows that, under translation inhibition, fluorescence can stop tracking how much reporter protein is actually there. Please share widely.

crème brûlée & other delicacies – how to analyze glycosylation 👇 #MicroSky

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Our latest #CDlab paper on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Led by 1st author Jaco van der Torre, we report our technique to create long (100 kb) DNA molecules with entirely user-defined sequences. We use this to design motif-depleted DNA sequences for single-molecule experiments.

Glad to share this new Microbial Primer on Mirror Biology written w/ Jolien Sweere. It's free to all in the @microbiologysociety.org journal Microbiology, edited by Steve Diggle. Thanks for this opportunity to outline our scientific knowledge of this significant topic. doi.org/10.1099/mic....

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Tiny plastics, hidden genetic impacts! Microplastics can reshape soil microbial genes, disrupt carbon and nitrogen cycling, and promote antibiotic resistance. 🌱 Explore the hidden risks beneath our feet! #Microplastics #SoilHealth 🔗: www.maxapress.com/article/doi/...

on #mLife, scientists found that when the black rot pathogen invades plants, the protein DrdR acts as a "molecular accelerator"—boosting pilus motor power to drive bacteria toward leaf hydathodes. 🔗 doi.org/10.1002/mlf2...

DNA polymerase I and DnaE mediate RNA-templated DNA synthesis over embedded ribonucleotides academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Technical limitations of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing in bacteria: challenges and future directions #microbiology #CRISPRCas9 #genomes #MicroSky link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Argyrin B reduced C. difficile in infected mice while largely sparing beneficial gut bacteria. Its optimal dosage and effectiveness against recurrent infections remain unresolved. doi.org/hcmxdq

🚨PhD opportunity alert!!! Come work with us on this new cool NERC DTP PhD project Investigate How Bacterial Hosts Control Domesticated Viral Machines to Drive Horizontal Gene Transfer in Marine Environments. Retweet = nice. Thank you!!! aries-dtp.ac.uk/studentships...

journals.plos.org/plospathogen... #microsky

phys.org/news/2026-10... #microsky

Transposons as a phage genetics toolkit 🧬 Phage Tn-seq (Tn5 + anti-CRISPR selection) maps essential genes across diverse phages, even a jumbo phage, and can drop new cargo into phage genomes in days. Kyte, Fineran et al., Nat Microbiol www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ever wondered how plasmid mobility differs across natural environments? In our new ISME Commun paper, Sebastian Bonhoeffer, @jhuisman.bsky.social and I ask: do F-like plasmids in E.coli associated with cows, pigs and poultry differ in their ability to transfer? [1/6] doi.org/10.1093/isme...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... #microsky