We found a viral Trojan Horse: a virus can hide inside another virus.This one surprised us: deltaviruses don’t just borrow a helper virus. They can travel inside it.
A literal Trojan Horse “virus-in-a-virus” route into cells. 🤯 Kudos to 1st author @viroscope.bsky.social and co-authors !
🧪 This bacterial strain has been maintained in sterile water since 1994.
Possible carbon sources incl. “phthalic acid - a plastic degradation product likely leached from inoculation tubes“.
Genomic variations accumulated between 1994 and 2022 suggested adaptations to long-term nutrient deprivation
My PhD work with the inimitable Joy Bergelson looking at local adaptation in a super-cool generalist pathogen that nucleates ice and decimates your favorite crop plant 🌱 👾 🧬 Thrilled to see this out (& reminded by @vscooper.micropopbio.org to celebrate each win)!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
My quote of the day
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin
This sounds like one of those days where putting on some music and committing to a deep clean seems oddly appealing 😂
It is widely accepted that #T6SS -mediated intoxication occurs only on solid surfaces, where prolonged cell-cell interactions are forced, and not in liquid environments. But is this generalization true? Our new preprint says it isn't. A 🧵 ...
biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🦠
🤣🤣🤣
Not exactly advice I give, but I believe this period is shaping the next gen of scientific leaders with unique skillsets. I wrote a bit about it here: uncultured.carinilab.com/p/an-open-le...
Of course, why wouldn't agar also impact AMR genes too. Everything's a variable, lol. Good preprint:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Marco Rubio is reportedly saying Maduro will stand trial in US courts.
Which means it’s now the US administration’s position that US courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the US president, accountable for crimes.
This year I skipped the stressful holiday visit with toxic family members and opted for doing child-safe science experiments with my best friend’s young children (under 5 years old). 10/10 highly recommend! Why are we not all making baking soda ‘volcanoes’ all the time
CATS: Canine Airport Therapy Squad
Bioinformatics is in shambles at the Denver airport’s acronym game
Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad
OK, #bioinformatics folk. We have some (many many) reads from a metagenome. They have been binned into a bacterial genome. They have no matches to any known genome in any database. They code for "bacterial" genes. What are good triple-checks to do to argue that they are not, in fact, euk sequence?
I am recruiting graduate students to my genomics-focused lab in EEB at Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Please spread the word if you know any students with an interest in a computational focus to genomics research! evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldi...
Excited to share our latest paper led by Ph.D. Candidate, Owen Hale, titled Elevated rates and Biased Spectra of Mutations in Anaerobically Cultured Lactic Acid Bacteria out now in mBio!
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
A new study provides evidence of a biological mechanism for how Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) may trigger lupus.
EBV seems to reprogram B-cells at the beginning of a cascade that ultimately results in autoimmunity.
The authors mention that EBV is a cause of MS, and may be related to LongCOVID.
Excited to share some new work led by grad student Sophie Walton (w/ @petrovadmitri.bsky.social). We used in vitro gut communities to study how natural selection acts on strains of the same species as they compete within larger communities. Check out Sophie's thread below for details!
Arizona rep sits at a plain fold-up table outside of Mike Johnson's office. The Speaker of the House official plaque is behind her. Her sign says "Mike Johnson is starving families and gutting healthcare to cover up the Epstein Files: Change My Mind!"
Probably the most badass thing I've ever seen!
AZ Rep Yassamin Ansari has set up a table outside of Mike Johnson’s offical Speaker Of The House office with a "Mike Johnson is using the government shutdown to cover up the Epstein Files - Change My Mind" sign!! 😆
Today on Club EvMed we enjoyed a super discussion with the authors of this important paper. Join us next time or enjoy the recording!
"Waning immunity drives respiratory virus evolution and reinfection" by Antia, Koelle & Bull
Club EvMed: sites.duke.edu/clubevmed/
academic.oup.com/emph/article...
Good evening from the Arctic!
That’s absolutely beautiful
Two PROTAC questions:
1) Does anyone know of a PROTAC for GFP (which could be used to degrade any GFP-tagged protein)?
2) Does anyone have experience with any of the available PROTACs for Halo (like HaloPROTAC3)?
Behold my seasonal culinary skills (and my 🐈⬛ who wants to share): monster mouths, ghostly bananas, and mummy pigs-in-a-blanket 🎃
Hey Yaniv Brandvain is not on Bluesky but his most recent biostats ebook is live ybrandvain.github.io/biostats/. His stats resources have been so helpful to me as I develop my own stats course, so check it out. Github repo here: github.com/ybrandvain/b...
Free, professional illustrations of research organisms! 🎨🐁🪼🧪
We compiled original vector/raster graphics of 70+ organisms & viruses into a CC0 library. All by @arcadiascience.com's Audrey Bell
Check it out & show us how you use them!
research.arcadiascience.com/pub/resource... #SciArt #OpenScience
We're excited to be recruiting an NIH funded postdoc to work in the Coop lab at UC Davis. We're specifically interested in candidates who are want to work at the intersection of human genetics, GWAS, and population genetics modeling. Please RT
Antimicrobial resistance is responsible for some 1.2 million deaths a year a year and contributes to millions more. Data in the new report shows that the problem is growing at an alarming rate. n.pr/3J0HVBC
Did you know that it only takes one spontaneous mutation in your bacterial culture to activate a phage, and trigger a subsequent cascade of bacterial/phage evolution? 🧪 Curious how you could detect similar events in your experiments? Check out Nanami’s work!
1/3 To those interested in microbial iron & metal transport: In 1992, the late JB Neilands (UCB), the pioneer in the study of Fe transport entrusted me with his collection of purified siderophores from a wide range of microbes—many of them unique chemical species that can no longer be reproduced
