Kyle MacLea 🦠

🚨 New preprint 🚨 We’ve discovered millions of viruses from sequencing data but we don’t always know who they infect. Our new tool, VHAMSTeR generates broad virus host predictions across the tree of life (prokaryote, plant, animal, fungi and protist hosts) A thread 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A new primary endosymbiosis lineage is awesome. I enjoyed this.

VIPR is now out in Science! What started with a mysterious RNA led us to an unexpected way of recognizing DNA, as well as some clues to CRISPR’s origins. So happy to share these two papers with an incredible team. Links below; original discovery thread here ↓

Ahem

ribosomologists of all colors take note 👇 a 28S rRNA variant that does not promote mRNA translation but 𝗶𝗻𝗵𝗶𝗯𝗶𝘁𝘀 it by blocking of the ribosomal exit tunnel 👀 «everything that can be regulated will be regulated» (murphy's law of molecular biology)

Our study on giant transposons Starship 🚀🧬 in the genome of the lichen fungus Xanthoria is now out in @pnas.org! What did we find out about Starships in #lichen fungi? 👇Updated thread below 🖥️ 🧪 🦠 🧫 #SymbioSky 1/6 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

In 2014, Jason Rosch and I met at a GRC in Tuscany and sketched an idea on a cocktail napkin: what if we evolved S.pneumo in mice, treated them with antibiotics, varied their immune systems and watched what won? 11 years and a huge team effort later, it's out in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social 🧵

Yesterday the US Administration supercharged its explicit effort to bar international students from staying in the US after graduation. All Americans should know: 1/3 of *all* STEM PhDs working in the US are immigrants who graduated from US universities, then stayed. www.piie.com/index%2Ephp/...

Here are a couple of examples. Lung cancer survival rates for EGFR+ mutated Lung cancer.

And yet universities continue behaving as though a heartfelt plea to Russ Vought will convince this administration on the merits to stop impounding funds and dismantling the agencies.

Two independent super-elegant studies from Maxwell & Laub labs find immune proteins that sense infection by binding to oligomeric phage protein rings (i.e phage portal), using them as a scaffold to assemble into their active immune effector form 🤯 Highly recommend read! 🤓📖l

A family of archaeal hibernation factors that bind in tandem and protect ribosomes in dormant cells | bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.19.700200v1?rss=1

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth! #protistsonsky 🧵

@standupforscience.bsky.social #StandWithJenna 2/2

“Private equity billionaire Marc Rowan was revealed last week to be the driving force behind a Trump administration campaign pressuring nine major U.S. universities. Apollo Global Management, which Rowan co-founded in 1990, own[s] the for-profit University of Phoenix.”

Polysaccharide-degrading archaea dominate acidic hot springs: genomic and cultivation insights into a novel Thermoproteota lineage Candidatus Marsarchaeota is now isolated and renamed as Tardisphaerales (phylum Thermoproteota) 🤓 @asm.org journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Lokiarchaea are tricky to work with in the lab: they grow very slowly, exclusively in an oxygen free environment with the presence of symbiotic bacteria. But with careful nurturing, scientists hope to witness their cell division at work.

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler! Nanopore's getting accurate, but 1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies? 2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them? with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social 1 / N

Extraordinary paper. I LOVE this sentence: “This translates to a net lateral gene transfer rate of ~250 genes L−1 seawater day−1 and involves both “flexible” and “core” genes. “ Must read in detail, but these numbers are amazing. academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

I gave a symposium talk at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 2025 (#eseb2025) meeting last week and this was my title slide showcasing how I was speaking as an independent scientist because @dalhousieu.bsky.social @dalhousie.bsky.social has locked us out.

Saddened to learn of the passing of Moselio "Elio" Schaechter—Distinguished Professor at Tufts, SDSU and UCSD—humanist and visionary leader in the fields of microbiology and scientific communication—mentor, friend, and inspiration to me and so many others Small Things Considered Big Things Achieved

🧪 Update: NSF will *appeal* an earlier court order that blocked 15% indirect rates. I'm mostly surprised it took this long for them to file an appeal. So the fight continues. See: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... Article from June as context: www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

Latest paper elifesciences.org/articles/107... closes an important cycle in our efforts to study regeneration: week-long recordings allow us to observe the behaviour of cells during the entire course of regeneration in a crustacean leg – bright objects in movie are fluorescent nuclei of cells. 1/6

W T A F This country is a joke. A very, very terrible joke.

Bacteria from a Yellowstone hot spring do something no other organism has been found to do: breathe oxygen and sulfur at the same time. 🧪 It's both aerobic and anaerobic, a beautiful freaky creature from a beautiful freaky place

🦠🧍‍♀️From bacterial to human immunity. We report in @science.org the discovery of a human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins that participates in the TLR pathway of animal innate immunity. Co-led wt @enzopoirier.bsky.social by D. Bonhomme and @hugovaysset.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

it's never been about antisemitism

Terrible Friday news dump.The wealth of expertise. The decades of scientific progress. The emerging and urgent challenges we were focused on tackling. It is all so short-sided and cruel. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/c...

M⃣I⃣S⃣S⃣I⃣N⃣G⃣ L⃣I⃣N⃣K⃣S⃣ 𝙉𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 paper by Sikora et al: metagenomic data from 1,313 ancient human remains over 37,000 years Identified >3,000 instances of known human pathogens Zoonotic pathogens begin to appear ~6,500 years ago coinciding with the rise of livestock domestication—major epidemiological shift

apart from its inherent qualities as a comic strip, I really appreciate that Watterson resisted the urge to franchise and merchandise C&H. There's no animated movie, no tv show, no line of toys, no ipad game. it exists in its entirety as a comic strip written and drawn entirely by one man.

Another day testing the limits of resilience. The Alexandria NSF building was designed for the NSF merit review process (gold standard), complete with a floor devoted to panels. Now we aren’t allowed to have in person panels. The loss of US science leadership will haunt this country for decades.

Kennedy provides a bunch of references for his claim that thimerosal in vaccines (barely used anymore) is harmful. If a high-school student submitted this as their reference list, they would fail. I will do what Kennedy didn’t - actually look at them. 🧵

Alright fellas. Come one come all, #amateurbiology poster presentation at #asmicrobe on our first set of methylation screening results on Halococcus. Come ask about an exciting new finding I couldn't put on the poster! #archaeasky EEB 1147 🧪🧫🦠

Tardidoc and What the Microbe! with @markowenmartin.bsky.social and @binomicalabs.org #ASMmicrobe2025

My lab studies bacterial infections. We spend a lot of time looking at (or for) species-specific genetic and genomic databases for hosts and microbes. FlyBase is the best of all—there is literally no comparison. Its existence is under threat. Please donate. www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

"Kennedy said in the video announcement that there was no clinical data to support additional shots for healthy children" LIES. Examining more than 386,219 kids and teens, scientists have shown that #COVID vaccine reduces the chances of developing #LongCovid by 20% www.thelancet.com/journals/ecl...

Academic freedom in the United States has found itself periodically under siege, but the current attacks from the federal government raise a new level of alarm. nyer.cm/u405qvQ

👋 Hi, we’re Unbreaking, a volunteer-run collective working to document our current moment of institutional collapse and its human costs—as well as the pushback and resilience work already underway. We believe this is critical work for building and retaining political agency.

I knew the U.S. higher education system was a massive draw for foreigners, but I did not know the U.S. sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it did natural gas and coal combined. Great piece by @crampell.bsky.social

Come and work with me! The Nature Micro team is expanding and we're looking for someone to champion microbial ecology, plant micro & related areas for the journal Knowledge of microbial ecology/plant micro is desirable but we're open to applications from all microbiologists Link below 👇

Measles likely came from cows (via rinderpest) around the 6th century BCE. For 2,500 years, we didn’t evolve superhuman resistance—children just died. Real protection only came in the 1960s, with vaccines. Our superpower isn’t evolving into superhumans. It’s outthinking pathogens.