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Excited to share our latest work The Anantharaman Lab on sulfur metabolism in gut microbiomes and colorectal cancer. Led by UW MSTP (University of Wisconsin-Madison) student Elise Cowley from our lab and Patricia G. Wolf . UW-Madison Department of Bacteriology Microbiology Doctoral Training Program Adam Breister biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Excited to share our new paper on phages and organosulfur metabolism in human and environmental systems led by Kristopher Kieft. A very big thanks to all coauthors Simon Roux ᴀʟᴇx ᴘʀᴏʙꜱᴛ Vatsan Raman Chao (Zhichao) Zhou @amlinz16 Jedd Rahlff cell.com/cell-reports/f…

CPT's @jason_j_gill is to present "Bioinformatic approaches for determining phage properties" tomorrow morning at 10:40am ET at the FDA and NIH Hosted Workshop on Science and Regulation of Bacteriophage Therapy.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/ni…

How does epistasis influence the evolution of an allosteric protein? We show that an allosteric protein simultaneously traverses multiple fitness landscapes shaped by epistasis which collectively govern the evolutionary trajectory of the protein. nature.com/articles/s4146…

#MDTP PhD Thesis Defense Tomorrow! Phil Huss from the Vatsan Raman lab will defend his thesis on host specificity in bacteriophages. Join us tomorrow June 30th at 1 pm (CT) in 1520 MSB or via Zoom DM us for a link to attend UW–Madison Biochem #UWMadison #Microbiology

If like me you've run hundreds of minipreps but never bothered to read up on why they extract plasmid but not chromosomal DNA, a recent tweet by @joel_rosenbaum finally motivated me to look it up. From Biennium and Doly 1979:

Online now - "#Highthroughput approaches to understand and engineer #bacteriophages" by Phil Huss Jackie Chen and Vatsan Raman. #phagehostinteractions #phagelibrary #phagemutagenesis #genomeengineering dlvr.it/SZ8B0p

AddThis | Home authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S09… Congrats to Laura Alexander, a recent graduate from our lab and the #mdtp for having her review out on Modes of therapeutic delivery.

What does the fitness landscape of a TF look like? We tested ~1200 ancestral and extant Lac repressors (DBD) that revealed a highly rugged landscape - a feature of regulators essential for high specificity and orthogonality. Fun collab w/ Colin Jackson biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Breakdown of PhD student cost on a grant: tuition $45K stipend $35K fringe $10K indirects $60K -- total paid by NIH to university: $150K total paid by university to student: $35K (this is just a toy example to illustrate a point, not real numbers but same ballpark)

New preprint for mining phage metagenomes for sequence motifs that drive phage activity. Metagenomes have a lot of potential for understanding and engineering phages. This was a fun collaboration with Karthik’s lab. Vatsan Raman Karthik Anantharaman Kristopher Kieft biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Phage single-strand DNA binding (SSB) proteins are, in many cases, essential components of the phage replication apparatus. Many defense systems seem to sense the phage SSB as a signature of infection. Here is another example 👇

Prepping for a class session on the Lac operon in Molecular Biology and it prompts my yearly reminder to you all that what we were taught about the actual substrate of the Lac operon is almost certainly wrong...1

Multiple new classes of phage proteins that inhibit bacterial immunity: Tad2 intercepts immune signals of defense TIR domains Gad1 traps the Gabija defense system in a cage And more... Fun collaborations with the Kranzusch lab! t.ly/NVEED t.ly/yZyu

A symmetry mismatch unraveled: How phage HK97 scaffold flexibly accommodates a 12-fold pore at a 5-fold viral capsid vertex dlvr.it/SqpJLX

We sent phages to the ISS – here are the results! We evaluated timecourse of phage activity, de novo mutations under microgravity stress, deep mut. scans of the receptor binding protein, and implications toward terrestrial pathogens. Phil Huss&chutikarn biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

New preprint for our experiment on the ISS evaluating phage-host interactions. Seeing how microbes adapt to microgravity reveals a lot about them! Thanks to Rhodium Scientific and Defense Threat Reduction Agency for facilitating this experiment! Chutikarn Vatsan Raman biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

The "Ship of Theseus" article has been edited 1792 times since it was created in July of 2003. At present, 0% of the phrases in the original article (seen below) remain.

Our new Science Advances paper presents Meta-SIFT for engineering phages using metagenomic motifs, allowing us to explore vast sequence spaces beyond the reach of traditional natural selection to create better phages. Vatsan Raman, Karthik Anantharaman. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…