Derrick Kamp

A flyer reading "MCC Education Working Group Committee Members Needed" It asks if you are an early career scientist wanting to explore careers paths and if you enjoy networking. Learn more at microbiomecenter.org

The Microbiome Centers Consortium (MCC) Early Career Working Group is looking for committee members! It's a great opportunity to explore career paths and connect with scientists across academia, industry and policy by assembling speaker panels for fellow early-career scientists!

lnkd.in/em4hyq7E

Hosting this panel this Friday! Come check it out

Pb concentration by decade in hair from Salt Lake City region residents. Value plotted for 1940 includes all samples from 1916 to 1959; value plotted at 2022 includes all samples from 2020 to 2024.

One of last week’s most-viewed PNAS articles is “Lead in archived hair documents a decline in lead exposure to humans since the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency.”
Explore the research: https://ow.ly/SMKg50YetGP

More trending articles: https://ow.ly/bQ8f50YetzE

New preprint from @pawley.bsky.social @scottnichols.bsky.social is a great testament to how intentional imaging helps untangle potential functions and mechanisms of host-microbe interactions

The discovery of an external bacterial niche reconciles sequencing-based microbiomes in a freshwater sponge

Come join our network at prideinmicrobiology.github.io!

🏳️‍🌈 Sign up for our mailing list for information about our events! 🦠

#Pride #STEM #LGBTQ

Fearing ICE, Native Americans rush to prove their right to belong in the US - ICT As Native Americans around the country rush to secure documents proving their right to live in the United States, many see a bitter irony.

The widespread targeting of Native Americans demonstrates its not about legal status, its about racial profiling. ictnews.org/news/fearing...

An announcement poster for a career panel on February 27, 2026. The panel is titled "Careers in Conversation: Pathways in Higher Education." It features images of the three panelists: Dr. Andrea Suria of Ohio Wesleyan University, Dr. Jennifer Oberle of Rutgers University Camden and Dr. Jo-anne Holley of The University of Texas at Austin.

Interested in a career focused on microbiology or microbiome education?

The Microbiome Centers Consortium is hosting a panel of educators representing different paths in secondary education. Come hear the advice and experience of some great teachers!

Register here: rutgers.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Speak of the devil....

bsky.app/profile/kamp...

Image shows large, rainbow-colored ovoids onna black background. Inside each ovoid is a speckling of white dots.

A z-stack image of aphid embryos and bacterial protein. The rainbow depth-coded projection grants the embryos a 3D effect, while the punctate white spots are bacterial protein. Feels very nebulous, in the most literal sense!

#FluorescenceFriday

Multiple ovals on a black background, some branching from each other. They appear to be glowing with a red blue and green hue from their fluorescent dyes.

The cool part of microscopy is that even when you don't get good data, you can still get cool images.

Aphid embryos labeled with DAPI, antibody and WGA. Imaged on an epifluorescence scope.

An announcement poster for a career panel on February 27, 2026. The panel is titled "Careers in Conversation: Pathways in Higher Education." It features images of the three panelists: Dr. Andrea Suria of Ohio Wesleyan University, Dr. Jennifer Oberle of Rutgers University Camden and Dr. Jo-anne Holley of The University of Texas at Austin.

Interested in a career focused on microbiology or microbiome education?

The Microbiome Centers Consortium is hosting a panel of educators representing different paths in secondary education. Come hear the advice and experience of some great teachers!

Register here: rutgers.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Bacterial diversity within the accessory nidamental gland of a Hawaiian bobtail squid (E. scolopes), showing Alphaproteobacteria (magenta), Verrucomicrobia (yellow), and Flavobacteriia (green). CREDIT: Nidhi Vijayan

Hawaiian bobtail squid maintain distinct microbiota in different organs, including bioluminescent bacteria in their light organs, by deploying immune factors with tailored expressions in each niche. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/QxLo50XPnyS

A super detailed protocol + video on Cryo-ExM - Cryo-Expansion Microscopy, led by the labs of our former postdocs @marinelap.bsky.social & @ebertiaux.bsky.social.
Clear, practical, and very useful for anyone doing nanoscale imaging 🚀 app.jove.com/t/68595/expa...

A hill on which I will die: Calvin and Hobbes is one of the great pieces of 20th-century American literature in no small part because it was never turned into anything aside from a comic strip. Leave it be.

Grey spots form the outline of an aphid abdomen on a black background. Inside, there are splotches of different colors. Closer inspections shows the splotches are made of little spots that are bacteria. Some are found in donut-shaped bacteriocytes and others are entering the aphid embryos.

I've started imaging the symbionts inside the bacteriocytes of aphids.

You can see the aphid body in white and the bacteria are depth-coded different colors to show the dimensionality. Some of the embryos are getting loaded up with symbionts!

#FluorescenceFriday

“‘In evidence-based policy, you gather data and then make a decision,’ [Jake] Scott said. ‘This is the reverse. CDC made the policy decision and then funded research to back it up. When you commission research after making a decision, you're not looking for answers—you're looking for validation.’”

This 🧵 is important & I want to highlight: They are going to give kids in an Guinea-Bissau a placebo for Hep B even though it's already proven to be safe. These white supremacists are putting African children at risk to support a thesis we know is wrong. They do not value Black lives.

Where Did Anti-Trans Laws Start? How a Forgotten Houston Ordinance Turned Into a Massive, Nationwide Culture War In fighting for bathroom bills in Houston, Texas conservatives provided a blueprint for the rest of the country.

IRW — a Pulitzer-winning nonprofit newsroom at American — and @thebarbedwire.com traced the history of anti-trans legislation. Houston conservatives realized homophobia didn’t fly anymore, weaponized girls’ safety, and parroted segregationist language. It worked.

thebarbedwire.com/2025/12/04/a...

A secreted endosymbiont protein essential for colonizing host cells Intracellular bacterial symbioses have arisen myriad times in eukaryotes, with dozens known from insects alone[1][1],[2][2]. Beginning with Buchnera , the obligate endosymbiont of aphids, genomes of e...

New preprint characterizing a protein likely required for vertical transmission. Some really stellar undergrads contributing to this work too!

A secreted endosymbiont protein essential for colonizing host cells

Love this cover

Really fascinating and important work

Once again, Spotify refuses to release the .csv of supplemental data behind Spotify Wrapped, thus fueling the reproducibility crisis.

Induced endosymbiosis between a fungus and bacterium reveals a shift from antagonism to commensalism - Nature Communications Gassler et al. implant a free-living bacterium into fungal cells to study early steps in the establishment of an endosymbiosis. They observe vertical transmission of the bacteria despite initial host ...

Induced endosymbiosis between a fungus and bacterium reveals a shift from antagonism to commensalism

@natcomms.nature.com by Thomas Gassler et al from Julia Vorholt

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ralstonia pickettii in the fungus Rhizopus microsporus

#Endofungal

The Lariviere lab at UMiami is recruiting PhD students! Incoming students will join us in studying host-microbe interactions in the honey bee gut, using molecular and genetic approaches. Please see the attached flyer for more details.

#Symbiosis #SymbioSky #MicroSky #PhDOpportunity #AcademicJobs

Single-nucleus profiling highlights the all-brain echinoderm nervous system A sea urchin is a head with a brain-like organization and a vertebrate-type retinal signature.

Our study, just published in #ScienceAdvances and funded by @hfspo.bsky.social, explores the post metamorphic cell composition of the sea urchin juvenile, revealing that its body is head-like. Long considered brainless creatures, they’re all brain instead!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This is definitive "Hell yeah" science

An ad for a panel discussion. The panel will take place November 7 at 3:00 PM ET. Three people are listed as panelists: Shayle Matsuda, a research biologist at John G. Shedd Aquarium. Corrie Whisner, an associate professor at Arizona State University. Jennie Starr JD, MA, Head of Market Insights, Brand Planning, and Promotion Management at Nestlé Health Science

Looking to learn about career paths in microbiome research?

Come join a panel discussion hosted by the Microbiome Centers Consortium. We're talking to some great folks in diverse positions about how they explored their proffesional paths.

lnkd.in/e6WVziXY

US Government accounts have arrived on Bluesky.

Block on sight.

Protect your digital space.

Be aware that the DHS account in particular is known to quote dunk on regular people to encourage their followers to harass them.

The detach quote function will come in very handy here…

Multispectral live-cell imaging with uncompromised spatiotemporal resolution - Nature Photonics A tree-like arrangement of dichroic mirrors and multiple cameras coupled with an iterative spectral unmixing algorithm enables multispectral imaging of live cells in up to eight spectral channels with...

🚨Publication alert🚨
My first, first-author paper is now out in @natphoton.nature.com! Our paper describes an iterative spectral unmixing algorithm and eight-channel camera-based hardware we developed enabling unmixing of low SNR live-cell data at video rates. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Somebody ask these guys where the name "Ohio" comes from