Patrick R. Secor

This job ad is now live! Please share or apply here: jobs.montana.edu/postings/52780 Screening of applicants begins Sept 15, 2026 #MicroSky #PhageSky #ScienceJobs

I’ll soon be #Hiring a postdoc to join the Secor Lab at Montana State University. This NIH-funded position will investigate phage biology in Lyme disease spirochetes. The official ad will be available soon. Please share with anyone who might be interested! #MicroSky #PhageSky 🔬🦠🧪🧫

We said farewell to @dominickfaith.bsky.social last Friday with a float on the Yellowstone River with the Secor, Wiedenheft, and Jennings labs from Montana State University. Dom is off to do a postdoc with @pbollyky.bsky.social at Stanford and we wish him the best! #MicroSky #PhageSky 🔬🧪🦠🧫

Check out this fun collaboration on phages and Polyamines with the Marshall Lab! #microsky #phagesky 🧪🧫🧬🔬

Nice write-up in Mountains & Minds on the Lyme disease research we’re doing at Montana State University. #MicroSky #PhageSky 🧪🦠 @ortizdeora.bsky.social 🔬 www.montana.edu/news/mountai...

Excited to share a 6 yr long journey to develop & validate a biomarker-based acute #Lyme disease diagnostic test using urine. Herculean effort by Osas and Saadman, which wouldn’t have be possible w/o outstanding collabs @harvard.edu, @tuftslyme.bsky.social, @pireschembio.bsky.social #Microsky

New lab group photo! #MicroSky #PhageSky

Fire’s out…

🆒 new pub! Rapid evolution of Klebsiella pneumoniae biofilms in vitro -> adaptations selected during infection by @gretazabo.bsky.social & Linus Sandegren *hypermucoidy evolves via 📈c-di-GMP, overlaps w/ mutations in UTI and wound isolates. *pleasure to advise this! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Watching this wild fire burn during a rainstorm from my living room

Montana State Rodeo

‼️Please share‼️ Nemudryi lab is looking for postdocs to join our team and study: 🦠 Bacterial phage defense mechanisms 🧬 RNA repair & CRISPR-based RNA editing Excited about RNA, host-virus interactions & mechanistic biology? Let's talk! Apply: explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53...

📣Huge preprint 🔔 Today we share something our group has been working toward for a long time, led by @lucasmoriniere.bsky.social We asked can we predict which receptor a phage targets from its genome sequence alone? For most phages, we couldn’t. So Lucas set out to do something I had only dreamed of.

New paper 🔔 Collaboration @sullivan-lab.bsky.social Marissa Gittrich led the work Klebsiella phage biology has focused almost entirely on capsulated strains, but capsule loss is the #1 resistance mechanism under phage predation. We used a naturally acapsular host to reveal the receptor landscape

🚨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...

🖥️ 🧬 ⚛️ 🔬 Plz spread the word. 2-week computational biology workshop in Singapore. No registration fee or expenses for US citizens. Protein annotation, function, structural modeling, and simulation. ~35 attendees. Lectures and hands-on tutorials with intensive instructor interaction. compbioasia.net

📣new preprint from the phagefoundry.org team 🎉 Jessica Trinh and Catherine Mageeney (Sandia National Laboratories)!! Systematic analysis of prophages from ~1000 Acinetobacter baumannii isolates, induction & screening. We found this 😎 looking phage with bunch of 💍💍

🧵 New preprint! Our 4-lab team evolved Streptococcus pneumoniae in antibiotic-treated mice of varying immune states and discovered something surprising: bacteria rarely evolved resistance. Instead, they found a different way to survive — by rewiring RNA turnover. 🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy to share a preprint—the last chapter of my dissertation with @mcsymbiont.bsky.social and Co—on what happens when bacterial endosymbionts accumulate huge numbers of pseudogenes during early genome reduction. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

My office this morning

Friends, please help spread the word about our microbiology REU program at Montana State University. www.montana.edu/mbi/reu/ Each student receives a stipend ($7000 for 10 wks). Travel compensation, room, and board are also provided. Details in the attached pic--Feb 14 deadline 🧫🧪🦠#microsky

Check out our exciting new paper out now in @plos.org where Dr Ahmad manipulated #peptidoglycan chemistry to understand Lyme disease and arthritis 👇👏 #Microsky #glycotime journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

I’m thrilled to share our work on phage triggers of the bacterial immune system in its final form @natmicrobiol.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Are you a graduate student or postdoc who wants to apply your science to policy? The Gulf Research Program’s Science Policy Fellowship provides experience for one year on the staff of federal, state, local, NGO in the Gulf region and impt networking. www.nationalacademies.org/programs/GUL...

Here, we find that many Genomic islands have origins of transfer (oriT) mobilisable by conjugation, incl. known Pathogenicity & defense islands. iOriT use only an oriT for transfer by hitching on conjugative elements: they make abundant, diverse, ancient families of mobile genetic elements. See🧵

🚨Call for papers🚨 Microbial Evolution: Impacts on Human Health in the society journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health Guest Editors: Bob Woods, Silvie Huijben & Camilo Barbosa EIC: me This will be great, please submit and share! academic.oup.com/emph/pages/m...

Now published in PLoS Pathogens! #microsky #phagesky journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

A prophage-encoded sRNA limits phage infection of adherent-invasive E. coli #PLoSPathogen from @prsecor.bsky.social journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

Merry Christmas! #microsky

The final form of my 2nd postdoc paper with the Bassler Lab! Turns out our favorite quorum-sensing phage isn’t a one-off, but rather a member of a globally dispersed family of phages that sense a universal autoinducer. #phagesky #microsky journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Looking for a paid summer research experience? Apply to MSU’s Extreme Biofilms REU and work on cutting-edge biofilm science in extreme environments. No prior research experience needed. #MicroSky #PhageSky

Bacterial genomes encode a rich repertoire of antiphage systems, but we still know surprisingly little about when these systems are actually expressed. In this preprint, Lucas Paoli et al, ask what shapes antiphage systems expression in native contexts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The Gallatin Range, Montana

Congrats Nanami! It was a pleasure to be on your committee 🎉🥳🍾

Had our lab holiday party and this was one of the white elephant gifts 🤣🫡 @dominickfaith.bsky.social #microsky #phagesky

Phages are full of genes of unknown function that are likely adaptive in specific conditions. New preprint: Phage TnSeq identifies essential genes rapidly and knocks all non-essentials. We would like to send a pool of phiKZ mutants to anyone wanting it! Reach out tinyurl.com/bdcfrejh

Beer!

🦠🧪🧬🚨 New paper and database alert: the new IMG/VR release is now MetaVR ! We have a new website - meta-virome.org - with quick search capabilities for the >24M viruses, >12M vOTUs, and >42M protein clusters (including >790k with predicted structures !). academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

Check this out for the 2026 SISB (phage defense) meeting in NYC. Mark your calendar! (and note the Zoom option, if needed) sisb2026.rockefeller.edu

Check out our latest paper on mirusviruses, one of the most remarkable new groups of protist viruses - extremely diverse, carry lots of spliceosomal introns (including new homing introns) and are at the evolutionary crossroads between tailed phages and herpesviruses! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Identification of Previously Unknown DNA-Binding Proteins Using DNA Affinity/Pull-Down Methods Followed by Mass Spectrometry Jutras, Babb, Jusufovic, Krusenstjerna, Saylor, Verma, and Stevenson Current Protocols 2025, 5:e70264 doi: 10.1002/cpz1.70264 #MicroSky

Want to see something that will fry your brain? Disappearing reappearing plaques on P aeruginosa @dominickfaith.bsky.social 🧫🦠🧪

Snowing at the lab today here at Montana State ❄️🦠🧫

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📣 New preprint from us at phagefoundry.org 📣 A solid machine learning framework & to predict strain-level phage-host interactions across diverse bacterial genera from genome sequences alone. Avery Noonan from the Arkin Lab led this massive effort www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just got an email from my SRO for the study section that was missed in October. Good news is that they are trying to reschedule ASAP (Dec/Jan). The bad news is that CSR is mandating that only the the top third (not half) of applications will get discussed for the next 2 rounds.

New lab paper! Andrew Frando describes how MexT alters the quorum sensing cascade in P. aeruginosa. /1 With Nicole Smalley; two undergraduates, Jamal Omar and Bobby Parsek; and @dezieleric.bsky.social, @mariecg.bsky.social, and Mylène Trottier at INRS in Montreal journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

For what it’s worth, The Wyoming Worm lab has funding for 5 years along with exciting projects with solid foundations. We are is still looking for capable, dedicated, and fun-to-work-with lab members at all career stages. davidfay@uwyo.edu scholar.google.com/citations?us...

1/10 Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from? Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral RTs, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...