1/10 🚨Preprint! One RING to rule them all (phages)👑💍⚔️ Bacteria build giant DNA-scaffolded RNase rings (larger than the ribosome!) to shut down viral infection🧬🧵👇 biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Liana Merk
@bacteriyay.bsky.social
PhD student in Sean Eddy’s lab! I like introns, phages, fermentation, and stamps.
New! R-scape version v2.6.11 github.com/EddyRivasLab... with drawings of R-scape annotated RNA consensus structures with many fewer overlaps!! Using RFview github.com/dincarnato/R... Shout out to @incarnatolab.bsky.social for displaying R-scape's covariation outputs + CaCoFold-R3D structures.
So excited to announce that I will be starting the Chen Lab at EMBL Rome in September 2026 🎉 ! The Chen Lab will investigate the genetics + evolution of innate behavior w/ high-throughput sequencing + computational methods across diverse rodent species. Stay tuned for upcoming opportunities...
We're excited to share our work on how prophages influence the evolution of resistance against DNA-damaging antibiotics! This has been a fun project with @sianowen.bsky.social, @baym.lol, @theshreyaspai.bsky.social, @kepatitis-c.bsky.social, & @fernpizza.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/
SOS-mediated prophage induction constrains resistance evolution to DNA-damaging antibiotics
Most naturally occurring bacteria are lysogens, encoding one or more temperate phages (prophages) integrated into their genome. As prophages are induced by the bacterial SOS response, DNA-damaging ant...
biorxiv.org
Dr. Indra Gonzalez Ojeda gave a great thesis defense this morning, including some wisdom for starting PhD students, or frankly, anyone.
(1/8) Very excited to share my first PhD preprint on phages from Hawaiian volcanic fumaroles from the East Rift Zone (ERZ) of Kīlauea! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR. We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets. Thread + link below.
Excited to see our work out in Science today! Using machine learning to identify prokaryotic immune systems www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
DefensePredictor: A machine learning model to discover prokaryotic immune systems
Antiphage defense systems protect bacteria from viral infection and have inspired important biotechnologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 while also revealing the evolutionary roots of eukaryotic innate immunit...
science.org
Peter DeWeirdt@pdeweirdt.bsky.social · 2y agoExcited to share our work using machine learning to predict anti-phage defense systems! 1/n
This was a really fun and interesting Molecule of the Month to do! Check out the article to see even more elaborate RNA-only structures.
RCSB Protein Data Bank@rcsbpdb.bsky.social · 7mo agoLarge and intricate naturally occurring structures composed exclusively of RNA... ROOL! More at Molecule of the Month: pdb101.rcsb.org/motm...
🎉 New year, NEW PREPRINT! Bacteria exhibit astonishing genetic diversity, but where do new genes come from? My best friend Arya Kaul (/labmate in the @baym lab) investigates how advantageous deletions can spawn new genes - "deletion-born fusions." 🧵:
bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 7mo agoNovel genes arise from genomic deletions across the bacterial tree of life https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.05.697752v1
🚀New preprint from our lab! I am very excited to finally share what has been the main focus of my PhD for the past almost 3 years! It is about viral dark matter and a powerful tool we built to shed light on it. 🧬💡 Continue reading (🧵)
This is it!!! This is the work I never want to stop hearing about. Kepler’s creativity and curiosity really shine through in this paper. Give it a read and enjoy 😎
Everyone's least favorite lab mate@kepatitis-c.bsky.social · 9mo agoWhat is the best strategy to win any contest? Eliminate your opponents of course. Recently, my friend @fernpizza.bsky.social showed how plasmids compete intracellularly (check out his paper published in Science today!). With @baym.lol, we now know they can fight. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Super excited that the bulk of my PhD work is now preprinted! Here we used whole-community competition, or coalescence, experiments to quantify selection acting on genetically diverged strains within larger communities. (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Been working on a really strange retron bacterial immune system, here's the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Type VI retrons are unlike any other. Phage infection triggers reverse transcription of a DNA fragment that activates translation of a toxin to kill the infected cell.
1/10 Genome maintenance by telomerase is a fundamental process in nearly all eukaryotes. But where does it come from? Today, we report the discovery of telomerase homologs in a family of antiviral RTs, revealing an unexpected evolutionary origin in bacteria. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Antiviral reverse transcriptases reveal the evolutionary origin of telomerase
Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) employ diverse and distinctive mechanisms of cDNA synthesis to protect bacteria against viral infection. However, much of DRT family diversity remains ...
biorxiv.org
RNA Structure beyond Canonical Base Pairs Guided by Evolution 🧪🧬 #AcademicSky #higherEd www.mcb.harvard.edu/department/n... @rivaselenarivas.bsky.social @rachellegaudet.bsky.social @cryptogenomicon.bsky.social @dulaclab.bsky.social @neurovenki.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social
RNA Structure beyond Canonical Base Pairs Guided by Evolution - Harvard University - Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology
In addition to messenger RNA (mRNA) that provide the code for proteins, there are other RNAs that exert their function just as RNA, usually referred to as non-coding […]
mcb.harvard.edu
You’ve heard of ubiquitination, meet deazaguanylation: Doug Wassarman in our lab discovered phage defense pathways have co-opted Q nucleobase biosynthetic enzymes to catalyze a new form of protein conjugation chemistry @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
What was antibiotic resistance like before we ever used antibiotics? How did we change what antibiotic resistance genes looked like over 100 years? Our paper looking at resistance genes from a century of NCTC historical isolates now out in mGen: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
Genomic resistance in historical clinical isolates increased in frequency and mobility after the age of antibiotics
Antibiotic resistance is frequently observed shortly after the clinical introduction of an antibiotic. Whether and how frequently that resistance occurred before the introduction is harder to determin...
microbiologyresearch.org
Phage DisCo! Our targeted phage discovery method in press today: journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... Perfectly timed with our four summer undergrad's first successful phage hunt... disco lights in the lab to mark the occasion 🕺
My father worked in a tire factory in Appalachia. Friends and family in the military. Used to vote Republican. Got into college on a diversity program for the underprivileged. Ended up a Harvard professor. And now my funding is terminated because we're trying to stick it to the elites.
The war on science in the US is already having an effect on private sector research like AlphaFold. Bears repeating but the private sector builds on top of things created by academic research for the public good. This hurts everyone.
(1/7) Very excited to share my first PhD preprint on the interactions of two of my favorite mobile genetic elements: phages and group II introns! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Prevalence of Group II Introns in Phage Genomes
Although bacteriophage genomes are under strong selective pressure for high coding density, they are still frequently invaded by mobile genetic elements (MGEs). Group II introns are MGEs that reduce h...
biorxiv.org
Final grad paper is officially out! Grateful for the incredible team and all the support along the way! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Tick-borne flavivirus exoribonuclease-resistant RNAs contain a double loop structure - Nature Communications
Many flaviviruses generate specialized non-coding RNAs that resist degradation by host exonucleases, promoting viral infection. Here, the authors characterize an RNA element in Powassan virus, highlig...
nature.com
Super excited to share a new preprint from our lab on design of small-molecule binding proteins using neural networks! The paper has a bit of everything. A new graph neural network, new design algorithms, and experimental validation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵🧪
Zero-shot design of drug-binding proteins via neural selection-expansion
Computational design of molecular recognition remains challenging despite advances in deep learning. The design of proteins that bind to small molecules has been particularly difficult because it requ...
biorxiv.org
Llamas, dolphins and measles? Oh my! So thankful this story is finally breaking containment from my time in the Manguso Lab at the Broad. Using pieces from viruses and llamas we engineered selective cell specific viral like particles with reduced immunogenicity for in vivo gene delivery
rnahub.og A webserver to generate RNA alignments with secondary structure assessment www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
I'm so happy that I can finally share the results of my first postdoc paper with @baym.lol!!! Turns out plasmids are an amazing system to study multi-scale evolution and we can track within-cell and between-cell dynamics! (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/earl...
Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics
Conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution, from populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements in microbes. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-r...
biorxiv.org