Last Sunday, Asimov Press published an article explaining why it's so hard to diagnose tuberculosis. Here are 10 interesting things we learned about TB while editing it: 1. TB (not malaria) is the deadliest infectious disease. It kills >1.2M people each year.

Amazing.

Phage-encoded small RNA hijacks host replication machinery to support the phage lytic cycle biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_micrbio

Elon is too clever to not know this is false... We cannot let such manipulative and cynical behavior become normalized, in the US or anywhere in the world. Public figures who do this should permanently lose the trust of the public.

OUT NOW A widespread phage-encoded kinase enables evasion of multiple host antiphage defense systems nature.com/articles/s4156…

🙏Our latest paper on MenT3 in vivo with xibing, Tim Blower, Olivier Neyrolles rdcu.be/dZle4 MenT3 targets serine tRNA in vivo/MenT3 is active under standard growth condition/The CCAse PcnA counteracts MenT3 activity. Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale , ANR - Agence nationale de la recherche, CBI Toulouse

TIL that E. coli K12 — the most widely used strain of bacterium for biological research — is named "K-12" because it was first isolated from a diphtheria patient staying in room K-12 of a Stanford University hospital in 1922. Naming conventions in biology are weird!

Phage vs. Bacteria: New findings! Phages use their own tRNAs to evade bacterial defenses like retrons and PrrC. Huge thanks to Azam for his hard work! in Nature Communications nature.com/articles/s4146…

For the past two years, we have been working on a novel approach to identify origins of transfer by conjugation in plasmids from any bacterial species. We are thrilled to see this work now published in Nature Microbiology after thorough peer review! nature.com/articles/s4156…

My first PhD paper is out in mBio !(tinyurl.com/h83mh8vy) Oral bacteria often form mixed species biofilms where aggregation drives interspecies interactions. But how do they bind to each other? Here, we investigated Veillonella parvula aggregation with other bacteria . [1/6]

We are scouting for a PhD student in antiphage immunity. Starting spring 2025 at University of Tartu, secondments at Lund University. Please contact me with i) CV and ii) max 2-page cover letter (why you, why this topic and why our team) at [email protected]. RT appreciated!

It has been a journey and here it is: my first post doc paper is out in Nature Communications 🎉🎉🎉 If you red the preprint, it's worth checking the revised manuscript, we added some cool stuff. A thread. ⬇️ nature.com/articles/s4146…

Refreshing to see so much science and energy on the other app. I encourage you to follow me there. My presence here will likely dwindle.

📅 Registrations are now open for the MOOC “Resistance to Antibacterial Agents”! 👉 Enroll Now: bit.ly/4fzYwqV 🌍 It's World Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Awareness Week! 💊 #WAAW #AntibioticResistance #AMR #OneHealth #PublicHealth #GlobalHealth #Antibiotics

You want to learn about microbiology from a fantastic lineup of speakers on a beautiful Greek island? PhD students apply now for the EMBO | FEBS Lecture Course The New Microbiology! Registration: 1 Apr 2025 Course: 03 – 11 Sep 2025 | Spetses, Greece meetings.embo.org/event/25-new-m…

Hidden in plain sight: Bacterial genomes reveal thousands of lytic phages with therapeutic potential biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Today in Science Magazine we report the development of a laboratory-evolved CRISPR-associated transposase (evoCAST) that supports therapeutically relevant levels of RNA-programmable gene insertion in human cells, a collaboration with Sternberg Lab. 1/13 drive.google.com/file/d/1I-UbCR…

Our latest story is now online nature! We discovered a phage defense system that deploys kilobase-long DNA homopolymers to protect against viral infection. Congratulations to all authors, and to the Wiedenheft Lab for a fun and fruitful collaboration! nature.com/articles/s4158…

Today Arc Institute releases State, our first perturbation prediction AI model and an important step towards our goal of a virtual cell State is designed to learn how to shift cells between states (e.g. “diseased” to “healthy”) using drugs, cytokines, or genetic perturbations

A new encyclopedic review, for plasmid lovers: academic.oup.com/nar/article/53… We (Mapi, Eduardo and I) hope you like it!