My favourite discovery ever has just come online. Can I please tell you about some seriously wacky molecular biology? The story starts with a reverse transcriptase that SOMEHOW defends bacteria from viruses. (👇 I recommend sound ON for the video 🎹) 1/

I’m thrilled to announce! Nothing’s happened, I just find announcements exciting

“Teaching fungi to drive” was not how I envisioned the apocalypse to start but I’m here for it

Cleanrooms, like those from the Phoenix spacecraft mission, harbor unique microbes shaped by extreme conditions. We identified 26 novel species! Despite strict decontamination, cleanrooms remain a hotspot for microbial discovery!

How are phages cleared from the bloodstream? We learned that serum factors but not neutrophils help clear phages. Thanks to Rob McBride and our terrific team of collaborators. insight.jci.org/articles/view/…

Join us now us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

Are vaccines unnatural? Yes, absolutely. Just like plumbing, antibiotics, cancer therapy, indoor heating, fruit in the winter, and cars are unnatural. Nature isn't a paradise, nature is death, injury, disease, and starvation. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something

Apparently, this is how ChatGPT thinks I look 😂

This review on scales of selection in antibiotic resistance is now published (open access) at: annualreviews.org/content/journa…

Birthday 27 years old "boy" in the lab while making his own birthday cake 🧫

If you start a tweet about your new publication with the journal name before the topic, I’m absolutely drawing conclusions about your values

Carboxysomes: Nature's nanofactories for carbon fixation! Our new review in Biotechnology Advances explores their structure, function, and potential to transform agriculture & bioengineering for a sustainable future. 📖 Open Access: doi.org/10.1016/j.biot…

This paper has been a long time coming: We looked at the genomes of historical bacterial samples over a century to look for trends of antibiotic resistance genes, finding multiple instances of them in infections before the age of antibiotics...

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I am happy to tell that our collaborative review article on #PhageTherapy has been just published in Nature Reviews Methods Primers rdcu.be/d9H92

Thrilled that our work on this problem with Karel Břinda, Zamin Iqbal, and others is out in Nature Methods today! We used phylogenetic compression (described in the thread) to compress every microbe ever sequenced onto a flash drive so that it can be searched with a laptop!

The latest work from my lab, Phage Disco, a method Ellie Rand developed for targeted discovery of bacteriophages based on the bacterial receptor, defense system, or other component they interact with, is now live in mSystems

New paper that looked at 15 million biomedical abstracts and found specific words that abruptly increased in frequency in 2024, likely due to the authors using LLMs. Take home message: don't use the word "Delve" science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Check it out - phages seem to cross the placenta from mom to fetus! Check it out here: insight.jci.org/articles/view/… Congrats to Jen Sequioia, Naomi Haddock and our terrific collaborators in the Winn Lab

Science is the greatest equalising force 👏