Yann Moalic

Yann Moalic

@drym.bsky.social

Genomicist with a keen interest in hyperthermophilic Archaea

228 followers821 following107 posts

Yann Moalic reposted

FEMS Journals
@femsjournals.bsky.social

Cooperation isn’t just for animals! Microorganisms also cooperate, shaping pathogen evolution, adaptation, and persistence. Ramirez-Mata et al. evaluate computational approaches to understand cooperative pathogens. buff.ly/4Zedfex #FEMSMicrobiolRev

Yann Moalic reposted

rose novick
@rosenovick.com

Very nice paper by @lljschoenmakers.bsky.social on how to interpret debates over adaptationism. He argues that the sides of the debate are divided by different commitments about what constitutes genuine scientific understanding.

link.springer.comScientific understanding and the controversy over adaptationism in evolutionary biology - European Journal for Philosophy of ScienceIn this paper, I show how explanatory and objectual scientific understanding can be used to explain the early 1980s controversy over adaptationism. In this controversy, criticasters of adaptationism a...

Yann Moalic reposted

Lucas Moriniere
@lucasmoriniere.bsky.social

Attention, phage friends! Our new work on predicting phage-host interactions is out in Nature Microbiology since yesterday! 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.comPhylogeny-agnostic strain-level prediction of phage–host interactions from genomes using machine learning - Nature MicrobiologyThis platform identifies phages capable of infecting specific bacterial strains using genome sequences alone and could enable rational phage-therapy design and precision microbiome engineering.

Yann Moalic reposted

Di Jiang
@dijiang319.bsky.social

Online today @science.org Noncoding transcription controls the developmental dynamics of long-range gene regulation | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.orgNoncoding transcription controls the developmental dynamics of long-range gene regulationThe genomic regions regulating gene expression are often themselves transcribed into a variety of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs). However, the regulatory roles of this noncoding transcription remain largely ...

Yann Moalic reposted

Nobuto Takeuchi
@nobuto.bsky.social

Sharing our new paper, led by PhD student Daniel Harrison. We propose that archaea aren't pathogenic because those living in eukaryotic hosts lack a metabolic prerequisite, and those with the prerequisite don't live in eukaryotic hosts. #microsky doi.org/10.1128/mbio...

journals.asm.orgWhy are archaea not pathogenic? A hypothesis based on metabolism-habitat covariation | mBioPathogenicity—the ability to cause infectious disease—is widespread among bacteria and eukaryotes but conspicuously absent from archaea, the third domain of life. To understand why archaea are non-pat...

Yann Moalic reposted

Philip Ball
@philipcball.bsky.social

The recent paper in Science by Bill Martin's team on a vent form of LUCA and a possible "dual origin of life" got some coverage last week. I took a somewhat deeper dive for @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/life...

scientificamerican.comLife’s ‘last universal common ancestor’ may predate life itselfA groundbreaking study hints at a hazy boundary between “life” and “non-life,” as well as two distinct origins of biology on Earth

Yann Moalic reposted

Philip Ball
@philipcball.bsky.social

"The central challenge is no longer building models that reproduce biological behavior, but building models from which causal structure can be inferred." Very sensible paper about not just throwing everything into your simulation or model. arxiv.org/abs/2608.06998

arxiv.orgSimulating is not always understanding: When model complexity obscures biologyIn cell biology, computational models of biological systems range from minimal representations with a handful of parameters to whole-cell simulations tracking thousands of molecular species across a c...

Yann Moalic reposted

Kenji Lee
@kenjilee.bsky.social

Adding to all the takes on this, something that is missed and why I don't think AI will progress beyond research assistant in neuroscience is so much of the work is embodied. Not just in that "an LLM doesn't have a body" but so much of the knowledge is only gained through embodiment.

Mark D Humphries@markdhumphries.bsky.social

At Cosyne, Chris Olah from Anthropic told us that neuroscientists had “3-4 years left to make a contribution” Why was not clear. Perhaps he was hinting at the below graph accompanying today’s Claude Science launch. Apparently we’ll all be obsolete soon.

Yann Moalic reposted

Carl Zimmer
@carlzimmer.com

Meet SpudCell, a synthetic cell made from lifeless ingredients that feeds, grows, divides, and experiences selection. If it doesn't have all the hallmarks of life, it has a lot! Here's my story. Gift link: nyti.ms/4vCbTih

Yann Moalic reposted

Evgenii Protasov
@evgenii-protasov.bsky.social

Archaeal and eukaryotic MCM rings sequentially melt DNA for replication initiation @natcomms.nature.com #microbiology #archaea #eukaryotes #MicroSky doi.org/10.1038/s414...

doi.orgArchaeal and eukaryotic MCM rings sequentially melt DNA for replication initiation - Nature CommunicationsTo prepare for DNA replication, a short region of DNA base-pairs must be broken, termed melting, allowing a helicase to gain a foothold on an isolated DNA strand. Here, authors use single-particle cry...

Yann Moalic reposted

Evgenii Protasov
@evgenii-protasov.bsky.social

Reconstitution of Archaeal Membrane Lipid Biosynthesis in Bacterial and Eukaryotic Hosts #microbiology #archaea #bacteria #eukaryotes #MicroSky doi.org/10.1002/cbic...

doi.orgReconstitution of Archaeal Membrane Lipid Biosynthesis in Bacterial and Eukaryotic HostsThe membrane lipids of archaea differ from those of bacteria and eukarya in backbone stereochemical configuration, chemical linkage type, and hydrophobic chain structure, a fundamental dichotomy term...

Yann Moalic reposted

Science X / Phys.org
@sciencex.bsky.social

A new microfluidic device measures cell elasticity rapidly and reliably, offering potential improvements in disease diagnosis and prognosis by analyzing mechanical changes in cells. doi.org/hbzg4j

phys.orgMicrofluidic device tracks cell 'squishiness' faster and more reliably than standard methodsResearchers from Brown University and their collaborators have developed a new way to measure the properties of cells—an important development, they say, because accurate measurements of changes in cell elasticity can be used to better understand diseases, diagnose patient symptoms and provide more accurate prognoses.

Yann Moalic reposted

Archaea Power Hour
@archaeapowerhour.bsky.social

Second up tomorrow, April 22nd at 10AM EST / 4PM CET, Katy Weber will tell us about her interesting work to mechanistically characterize electron transfer in a reductase protein from Haloferax volcanii!! Visit the link in our bio for more info on how to join our community!!

Yann Moalic reposted

Raphael Laurenceau
@raphael-microb.bsky.social

🔈Paper out! We turned the most fascinating phage host-switch mechanism, diversity-generating retroelements, into a programmable mutagenesis tool, DGRec. You can perform targeted hypermutation of any 50-200bp sequence directly in vivo in E. coli www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.comDiversity-generating retroelements for programmable targeted hypermutagenesis - Nature BiotechnologyDiversity-generating retroelements are engineered for directed evolution in E.coli.

Yann Moalic reposted

Vaughn Cooper
@vscooper.micropopbio.org

Replying to @neuroniv.bsky.social

We should all do our part to join Brian in ending genetics essentialism. I give a lecture at Pitt to the new PhD students entitled "There is no such thing as wild-type." I blogged about this years ago and it's part of my teaching statement. Long road, team effort✊🏻 micropopbio.org/blog/2018-07...

micropopbio.orgThe root of pan-adaptationism?There’s been a fair bit of recent discussion about why most biologists are (uncritically) adaptationists. I don’t dispute this but think it’s worth reconsidering why. Some have argued that this is bec...

Yann Moalic reposted

Nature Microbiology
@natmicrobiol.nature.com

#NatMicroPicks Same destination, different routes 🍄🧫🧪 Following 10,000 generations, parallel evolution occurred in separate yeast species, but took different genetic routes driven largely by transcriptomic and trans‑regulatory differences. #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.comParallel but distinct adaptive routes in the budding and fission yeasts after 10,000 generations of experimental evolution - Nature Ecology & EvolutionExperimental evolution of fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) in the same environment as a previous experiment with budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) reveals parallel evolution but distin...