The World Cup, a tournament I have been obsessed with since I was old enough to know what football is, starts in three days, and I genuinely find myself completely uninterested. The vibes for this tournament are so rancid.

This pre-printed article discusses insect oviposition as a tractable, mechanistically grounded model for behavioural immunity, linking individual egg-laying decisions to population level disease dynamics. 🪰🦠 doi.org/10.32942/X2W...

Interested in #virulence? Not sure what it is - or how to explain it? Just curious? 🧐🦠🧬🦋 @kayla-king.bsky.social and I just wrote a Primer for @currentbiology.bsky.social on the ecology and evolution of virulence! Check it below and share :) #MicroSky #EvoSky #pathogens

Ecology and evolution of virulence

Silva and King discuss the concept of virulence and the ecological and evolutionary factors that shape it.

cell.com

New research finds that sleeping fruit fly brains respond to sensory stimuli just like vertebrates, pointing to evolutionarily conserved neural signatures of sleep. By @siddhantpusdekar.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/sleep/drosop...

Drosophila, like vertebrates, filter sensory information during sleep

Predictive sensory processing in sleeping Drosophila echoes vertebrate research, establishing an evolutionarily conserved neural signature of sleep.

thetransmitter.org

Did you know? 🧪 "The Interactive Fly" is a wonderful website hosted by @socdevbio.bsky.social where you can learn about their development, the history of gene discovery/name, and it is full of super useful resources for the #DevBio community 🪰https://www.sdbonline.org/sites/fly/aimain/1aahome.htm

The final piece in a 27-year fly immunity puzzle. Yao describes "Paillotin" (Pai), the name given to #Drosophila "IM18." With this paper, all 24 Immune-induced Molecules (IMs) from Uttenweiler-Joseph et al. (1998) have been named & characterized. 🎊 Pai is an HDP conserved across fly 🪰 species 1/n

Functional Characterization of Paillotin: An Immune Peptide Regulated by the Imd Pathway with Pathogen-Specific Roles in Drosophila Immunity

Insects, such as Drosophila melanogaster, rely on innate immune defenses to combat microbial threats. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) play an important role in limiting pathogen entry and colonization. ...

biorxiv.org

📢 Meet the speakers of the 2025 SymbNET Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses gimm.idloom.events/phd-summer-s... 👉 Know more about Jewelna: noguchi.ug.edu.gh/fellows/dr-j... #SymbioSky #MicroSky

SymbNET PhD Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses 2025 with great lecturers: J. Akorli, @berasymbionts.bsky.social, M. Blaser, T. Bosch, @nicoledubilier.bsky.social, @fkttkm.bsky.social, I. Gabanyi, G. Dominguez-Bello, and... 1/2 #SymbioSky #MicroSky gimm.idloom.events/phd-summer-s...

PhD Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses 2025

Symbnet PhD Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM) & Católica Biomedical Research Centre (CBR) July 06...

gimm.idloom.events

Time to give an update on the fantastic work by @taniafpaulo.bsky.social during her PhD, now published in @royalsocietypublishing.org on the evolution of resistance and disease tolerance mechanisms to oral infection in #Drosophila royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... #infection #immunity 🤓🎊

Evolution of resistance and disease tolerance mechanisms to oral bacterial infection in Drosophila melanogaster | Open Biology

Pathogens exert strong selection on hosts that evolve and deploy different defensive strategies, namely minimizing pathogen exposure (avoidance), directly promoting pathogen elimination (resistance) a...

royalsocietypublishing.org

This #InternationalWomensDay I want to tell the story of Lilian Vaughan Morgan. I learned of Lilian this past year - what a badass. Lilian was a leading scientist when women weren't welcome in the lab, nor even the department. But she contributed immensely to the genetics of sex determination 1/n

The strain on scientific publishing: we set out to characterise the remarkable growth of the scientific literature in the last few years, in spite of declining growth in total scientists. What is going on? direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... A 🧵 1/n #AcademicSky #PhDchat #ScientificPublishing #SciPub

PhD Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses. Awesome topic. Unbeatable location. #symbiosky #microsky #evobio gimm.idloom.events/phd-summer-s...

PhD Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses 2025

PhD Summer School on Host-Microbe Symbioses Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM) & Católica Biomedical Research Centre (CBR) July 06 -19, 202...

gimm.idloom.events

Workshop on ecological & evolutionary immunology/insect immunity. 15-19th Sept 2025 - Werbellinsee, Germany, organised by Sophie Armitage and Jens Rolff. Abstract deadline start of March www.bcp.fu-berlin.de/en/biologie/...

To US colleagues who have lost or are in imminent danger of losing their jobs: please DM whether we can accommodate your research.

I am very happy to see this first part of my PhD work go online now! 💃🏾 We explored alternative strategies to elicit #diseasetolerance in #Drosophila melanogaster in response to oral #infection with a natural bacterial #pathogen, #Pseudomonas entomophila. (Thread)

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · last yr.

Pathogen-Induced Damage in Drosophila: Uncoupling Disease Tolerance from Resistance https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.31.635923v1

'The problem is compounded by the matter of communication. Science is nuanced. New evidence often complicates established research findings, experts disagree over what lessons to draw from the evidence, and news outlets favor eye-catching studies over rigorous methodology.'

The dangers of keeping epidemiology the “hidden science”

Caitlin Rivers wants to tell the story of epidemiology and the public health heroes who keep the world safe and healthy.

bigthink.com

Experimental evolution of a pathogen confronted with innate immune memory increases variation in virulence https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.20.629598v1

Is it more than malaria? Hemorrhagic fever concerns resurface in panzi, DRC outbreak. apnews.com/article/cong...

Congo man dies with hemorrhagic fever, indicating mystery outbreak could be more than just malaria

A man in western Congo has died with hemorrhagic fever symptoms. Health authorities say that has led them to suspect that a still-unidentified virus may be involved alongside malaria in a mysterious o...

apnews.com

"What makes a super-spreader? Unravelling the genetics of host infectiousness" Funded #PhD position in my lab exploring the drivers of host heterogeneity in pathogen transmission. Get in touch if interested. Deadline 17 Jan 2025. #HostPathogen #DiseaseEcology www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

EastBio: What makes a super-spreader? Unravelling the genetics of host infectiousness. at University of Edinburgh on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - EastBio: What makes a super-spreader? Unravelling the genetics of host infectiousness. at University of Edinburgh, listed on FindAPhD.com

findaphd.com

Fresh off the press, our work on wing deployment in Drosophila 🪰: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Work by: Simon Hadjaje, Ignacio Andrade-Silva, Marie-Julie Dalbe and Raphaël Clément

Grmai, L., Michaca, M., Lackner, E., Nampoothiri, V. P. N., Vasudevan, D. (2024). Integrated stress response signaling acts as a metabolic sensor in fat tissues to regulate oocyte maturation and ovulation. Cell Rep, 43(3):113863 www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Integrated stress response signaling acts as a metabolic sensor in fat tissues to regulate oocyte maturation and ovulation

Across phyla, female reproduction is intimately tied to nutrient availability. Here, Grmai et al. demonstrate that the evolutionarily conserved integrated stress response acts a nutrient sensor in Drosophila fat tissues to regulate female reproduction via two ways: by regulating yolk production and by modulating neurons responsible for egg laying.

cell.com

The birth of fruit fly's central nervous system imaged with multicolor #adaptive #lightsheet microscopy. The microscope self-aligns to a signal that appears during imaging. www.nature.com/articles/nbt...

Keeping your symbiosis genes on a plasmid is a smart move if you have multiple potential hosts. Here a gut bacterial symbiont, but same is true for N-fixing Rhizobia. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A conserved bacterial genetic basis for commensal-host specificity

Animals selectively acquire specific symbiotic gut bacteria from their environments that aid host fitness. To colonize, a symbiont must locate its niche and sustain growth within the gut. Adhesins are...

science.org

Drosophila and Lactiplantibacillus plantarum in the spotlight (again), what a wonderful model (disclaimer I am biased ;-) ). Congrats Will and team! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A conserved bacterial genetic basis for commensal-host specificity

Animals selectively acquire specific symbiotic gut bacteria from their environments that aid host fitness. To colonize, a symbiont must locate its niche and sustain growth within the gut. Adhesins are...

science.org

Remind me again, why are there no emojis for the fruity? 😟 #drosophila #modelorganism #Nobelprize

Dear grad students, Don’t go into the lab tomorrow. Put the thesis away. That data analysis can wait too. Spend time with your loved ones/take a day of rest. The science will be there when you get back. Sincerely, A retired grad student

This is so cool!🤩

Jens Rister@rister.bsky.social · 2y ago

🧪Party on the left, business on the right! 😎 Graduate student Heena Khurana found this interesting mutant: #Science #Drosophila #scicomm #Flyeyes

🧪Party on the left, business on the right! 😎 Graduate student Heena Khurana found this interesting mutant: #Science #Drosophila #scicomm #Flyeyes

ICYMI: we wrote a book. It's a free PDF, but you can also get a physical copy just in time for the holidays. Probably. I dunno. We don't actually get money from it. This was a labour of love by Hannah & Bruno. Also I helped. Stocking stuffer idea: USB loaded with The #Drosophila Immunity Handbook 🪰

Mark A. Hanson@hansonmark.bsky.social · 2y ago

The #Drosophila Immunity Handbook 🧵 This project started as a review with the aim, in some sense, to update Lemaitre and Hoffmann (2007; Ann Rev Imm). Then it kinda... got out of hand. But the reason that happened is because Hannah is amazing. Find the free PDF here btw: bit.ly/DrosImmBook 1/n

Glad to finally be here! Happy to interact with the #Science community especially pertaining to #Drosophila #immunity, #infection and #evolution 🤓👉🏾👈🏾