Gavin Thomas (he/him)

This is such a great piece of work about an amazing evolutionary story, every part of this is incredible. Congrats @rudycadenabioevo.bsky.social @evanowack.bsky.social Among other surprises, oxygen scavenging instead of photorespiration is not something I was expecting!

This will be an amazing opportunity for the right person. The Department of Veterinary Medicine in Cambridge is recruiting for an established chair who will also be our Head of Department. Your research can be in any area of veterinary science. Please circulate. www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/profess...

Next Wednesday we're running a live webinar on examining the genomes of examples of the 6 ESKAPE pathogens, using tools available in MORF Genomes. Come & learn about AMR gene and genomes using our visual browser-based tools. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-superb...

nice to see a photo from my York collection in this latest article from @yorkcivictrust.bsky.social on the Northern Powerhouse :-) yorkcivictrust.co.uk/no-10-north-...

A quinone-transporting pseudomembrane complex in Bacillota including staphylococci. Amazing!

Professor Bonnie Bassler is awarded the Copley Medal for her discovery of the universality of chemical communication in bacteria and for her idea that interfering with this communication could form the basis of novel anti-bacterials. #RSMedals https://royalsociety.org/medals-and-prizes/copley-medal/

Bacterial lipid structural diversity mediates commensalism and pathogenesis #microbiology #bacteria #lipids #MicroSky @natrevmicro.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Congratulations to #ucdavis Alum Bonnie Bassler www.princeton.edu/news/2026/08...

Thrilled to share that our paper describing protein-dependent frameshifting is now out in Molecular Cell @cellpress.bsky.social. Huge congratulations to @jemmabetts.bsky.social for publishing the first research paper from her PhD 🧬🧪🥳 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/8

A stress response can be a great starting point for discovering new biology! By following genes regulated during the chloroplast unfolded protein response, we’re discovering novel factors involved in chloroplast homeostasis. Here’s the first one we characterized: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

✨ We're excited to announce our fifth keynote speaker for #coesb26, Prof @gavinhthomas.bsky.social! Gavin is a Prof. at the Department of Biology at the @york.ac.uk ac.uk, UK. We're looking forward to hearing from Prof Thomas soon! 📅 Registration opens this week! @arc-gov-au.bsky.social

After a bit of a rough patch my lab's funding situation has taken a significant upturn, so if you're looking for a Postdoc position please keep us in mind...Pseudomonas aeruginosa genetics, regulation, and physiology - with a focus on the cell envelope. Please repost. andrewdarwinlab.org

Science is rapidly changing - for better and worse - and we hope that this article collection will serve as a reference as we all navigate these new realities. The first article by Dr. Friedrich Götz of @unituebingen.bsky.social is posted and i highly recommend it journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Happy to have this collaborative work with Zach Armstrong now out in Angewandte chemie doi.org/10.1002/anie... . We use a linked assay, coupled with fluorescent probes, to analyse mucin active carbohydrate sulfatase kinetics, cellular location, and inhibition.

Great to see Sam's work on PdhD out now in Microbiology! Very cool story showing how subtle metabolic adaptations can give Staph an edge during systemic invasion #microsky www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

A lipid cue drives the subcellular localization of a self-inserting bacterial transmembrane protein bioRxiv from @ramamurthilab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

What a kick-off to @pintofscience.uk in York last night! Presenters covered topics on solar panels & biodiversity, sustainable fishing & maths, biomolecules science, and stressed microbes by @gavinhthomas.bsky.social #pint26 #STEM #AVERTproject #BBSRC

Reflecting on the passing of J. Craig Venter, who I never met, and was not everyone's cup of tea, but TIGR's work on the first bacterial genome in 1995 has to be the landmark paper in my PhD era and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it has shaped my whole academic career. #lovemicrobiology

Congratulations Lukas on this nice work which we heard about at the Staph GRC last Autumn. More great work from Tübingen @andreaspeschel.bsky.social

@gavinhthomas.bsky.social is taking the stage for the Pint of Science Festival! 🍻🔬Join him on May 18th for a fascinating deep dive into the world of microbes and how they handle stress pintofscience.co.uk/event/nature... #outreach #BBSRC

New paper! We have written a (hopefully) simple primer on microbial energy metabolism - how do bacteria harvest energy from their environment, and how does this impact their behaviour? www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Had lots of fun too at the Memb Prot Conf in Birmingham a few days prior, getting to know @chrismulligan.bsky.social, @gavinhthomas.bsky.social, @allistercrow.bsky.social, @renaeryan.bsky.social and catching up Andy Lovering, Jani Bolla, @pstansfeld.bsky.social & @davidroper2.bsky.social of course!

If you’re attending @microbiologysociety.org 2026 keep an eye out for Luke Shipley from the MORF-Bio team. He’ll explain how to explore your microbial data through interactive, visual tools with MORF Genomes. 🎁 And there’s a £100 Amazon voucher up for grabs! If you spot Luke, come and say hello!

Check out the first of our public lectures on AMR run by the YPS - kicked off by the fantastic Prof. Jess Blair from Birmingham. What is a superbug? @jessicamablair.bsky.social @ypsyork.bsky.social @ybri-uoy.bsky.social - two more in the series coming soon! www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFYs...

It is with deep sadness that we share the passing of Professor Jeff Cole. An esteemed academic, Jeffs research on bacterial adaptation to oxygen and nitrosative stress made a lasting impact on the field. He mentored nearly 60 doctoral students, our thoughts are with his family, friends & colleagues

"Nobody will care about your work about sugar metabolism and transporters in Neurospora crassa" Nobody can predict what can happen with your work. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How do you react when your favorite microbe is renamed by taxonomists who are completely outside your field—and who ignore the community that actually works with it? Here is our clear answer re the case of Pseudomonas putida KT2440 👉🏻 journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Heading down to the Festival of Genomics to tell people about MORF and get the latest on Microbial genomics - give me a DM if you’d like to chat 👍

Proud supervisor moment - these two superstars Reyme Herman and Imran Khan (@imrsankhan.bsky.social) graduated today from @biologyatyork.bsky.social. Both key members of the group in developing our Staphylococcal research & much more.

Interesting new paper on Enterococcus lactis (the species formerly known as Clade B E. faecium) 'The Mannose Phosphotransferase System in Enterococcus lactis Is Essential for Gastrointestinal Colonization' onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/s...

Our paper on polymyxin interacting with the E. coli outer membrane is out! Simulations by the very talented @dheerajprakaash.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s42... To scale outer membrane protein island simulated at coarse-grained resolution with portions refined at all atom resolution.

Amazing dataset describing the metabolic profiles of 66 E. coli transporter knockouts by @sulheim.bsky.social with Peter Doubleday and @nzamboni.bsky.social. The tool, set up by @lambdapp.bsky.social and Eric Ulrich allows you to explore for yourself. Enjoy! Pre-print here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

The deadline for the first of our three fully funded PhD studentships is tomorrow! Determining the role of the dual-function VanT in C. diff vancomycin resistance. Collab with @gavinhthomas.bsky.social and Marjan van der Woude

#Throwback 🧪 COMMENT | Metabolites are not genes — avoiding the misuse of pathway analysis in metabolomics KS Lee, X Su & T Huan

Our sLola consortium is now in BlueSky! Worth following for future updates on our work with IM30 proteins including LiaH, PspA, and VIPP's.

Now properly published at @natcomms.nature.com with few additional experiments incl. demonstration of Daptomycin's ability to depolarise non-growing cells. See the original preprint-thread for a summary of our findings. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #microsky

Check out our new paper: 🔗 www.cell.com/structure/fu... We explored how sulfate-reducing bacteria import isethionate, a sulfur-containing molecule found in the environment and produced by microbes in the human gut. We captured a structure of the IseQM TRAP transporter in a substrate-bound state.

Absolutely delighted (and proud) that @freyaallen.bsky.social passed her viva with minor corrections today. Thanks very much @jessicamablair.bsky.social @robfagan.bsky.social for examining!

1. Characterising the role of the dual-function VanT in C. difficile vancomycin resistance. A collaboration between our group in @molmicrosheffield.bsky.social and the groups of @gavinhthomas.bsky.social and Marjan van der Woude at the University of York www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Excited to share our preprint led by Carlos Voogdt et al We developed new genetic tools & genome-wide libraries for species of the Bacteroidales order; constructed saturated barcoded transposon libraries in key representatives of three genera. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...