Tessera

Jan Claesen

@claesengroup.bsky.social

Associate Professor at Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic. Lover of bacteria in isolation and in communities. Dissecting the human microbiome on a molecular level. 🇧🇪🇺🇸 Father of two. Views are my own. https://claesengroup.org/

216 Posts4276 Follower 1624 Folgt

scha·den·freu·de @blisterpearl.bsky.social · 3d ago

Top panel is tiny planet Mercury in relation to the HUGE Sun.
Bottom panel is a similar image, a tiny "close ad" button in relation to the fingertip labeled "my finger" which fills nearly the entire panel.

Masschelein Lab @masscheleinlab.bsky.social · last wk.

📢 We're hiring a postdoc! If you're passionate about microbial biosynthetic pathway elucidation and enzyme discovery we'd love to hear from you! www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

Postdoc Microbial Biochemistry: Biosynthetic Enzyme Discovery in Cable Bacteria

Elucidating the biosynthesis of a unique nickel-containing conductive structure for long-range electron transport in cable bacteria

kuleuven.be

Jan-Ulrik Dahl (Dahl lab, ISU)@janulrikdahl.bsky.social · 2w ago

Are you passionate about understanding how bacterial pathogens survive host immune defenses and oxidative stress? My lab @illinoisstateu.bsky.social is looking for a highly driven and scientifically curious PhD student! Information about us can be found here: about.illinoisstate.edu/jdahl1/

Sean Gibbons 🦠💩@gibbological.bsky.social · 2w ago

Dear microbiome enthusiasts: I'm excited to be moving my lab to New York University this fall (& the NYU Institute for Engineering Health); with joint-appointment @isbscience.org I'm hiring a postdoc @ NYU to look at diet-driven evolution in the gut: apply.interfolio.com/189980 Please share! 🦠🤓

Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

apply.interfolio.com

Sholto David @sholtodavid.bsky.social · 2w ago

Today I'm posting a blog about another ridiculous antibody blunder. Dozens of papers in the senescence and ageing field have mistakenly used an antibody for E. coli β-galactosidase when trying to stain for the human protein with the same name. forbetterscience.com/2026/07/21/d...

Joint Genome Institute @jgi.doe.gov · 2w ago

New research decodes how a single stress signal transforms bacterial metabolism, offering engineers precise targets for designing better microbial factories. 🖥️ 🧬 More: https://jgi.doe.gov/user-science/science-stories/pinch-salt-activates-silent-gene-clusters-streptomyces

A Pinch of Salt Activates Silent Gene Clusters in Streptomyces | Joint Genome Institute

This single environmental trigger highlights efficiency for users requiring multiple omics methods to examine microbial chemical production.

jgi.doe.gov

Ruth Isenberg, PhD @ruthlessruth15.bsky.social · 3w ago

Officially Assistant Professor of Biology at @macalestercollege.bsky.social! It's been an exciting first (half) week getting my lab set up with the help of my research students Amy and Ivana. We may even get an experiment in next week!

Three smiling women standing in a research lab.

Three Polaroid photos featuring the same three women in a research lab.

c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · last mo.

"Spa" refers to a particular town in the Walloon region of Belgium, famous for its mineral baths with supposedly curative properties. During Roman occupation, it was called 'Aquae Spadanae'. Over time, the name came to refer to any place of healing & rejuvenation.

The town that launched a global self-care industry

Long before wellness became a global industry, a small town in eastern Belgium shaped how Europeans thought about health, leisure and water.

bbc.com

Mark O. Martin @markowenmartin.bsky.social · last mo.

Context is important. Especially for microbiologists.

Rauf Salamzade @raufs.bsky.social · last mo.

Microbes that have the greatest genomic potential for secondary metabolism tend to be multicellular. Here, we show that signatures of ancestral BGC expansions within 3 bacterial phyla and 2 fungal lineages coincide with origins of complex multicellularity [1/12] 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Complex multicellularity is linked with expanded specialized metabolite production in microorganisms - Nature Microbiology

The evolutionary emergence of complex multicellularity in bacteria and fungi, such as the ability for mycelial growth, is strongly associated with increased genomic carriage of biosynthetic machinery ...

nature.com

Vienna BioCenter PhD Symposium 2026 @vbc-phd-symposium.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Meet the students organizing the 2026 Vienna BioCenter PhD symposium. Chloé B, Polina D, Maura H, Julia K, Konstantina K, Elisa M, Niccolo DM, Hannah M, Magdalena O, Federico S, Petra S, Agastya S, Kasia S, Moritz W, Felix W, Daniel V With great support from the VBC training team.

In Preparation @inprep.bsky.social · 2mo ago

New Marvel Movie Features Supervillain Radicalized By Starting Grad School During Pandemic, Graduating In 2025

LOS ANGELES, CA—Marvel Studios announced Tuesday that its next Phase Seven film will feature a supervillain whose origin story consists of starting a PhD in molecular biology in September 2020 and…

inpreparation.substack.com

anil oza @aniloza.bsky.social · 3mo ago

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Twitter thread from Thomas Dietterich, reading "Attention
@arxiv
authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/
3:03 PM · May 14, 2026
·
66.7K
Views
Relevant
View quotes

Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). 2/
Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper. 3/
Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue. 4/
Thomas G. Dietterich
@tdietterich
·
1h
Examples of incontrovertible evidence: hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM ("here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?"; "the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments") end/"

Helen Branswell 🇨🇦@helenbranswell.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I find this unsettling: A new study in #Lancet shows that the number of faux citations in scientific articles is on the rise, and #AI is likely to blame. @aniloza.bsky.social reports. www.statnews.com/2026/05/07/l...

will pooley @willpooley.bsky.social · 3mo ago

absolutely wild to see people out here saying that it is responsibility of peer reviewers to check for hallucinated references. it is hard enough to persuade people to read articles and provide reviews. expecting them to spend hours cross reffing literature is unreal.

Jan Claesen @claesengroup.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Just love getting an invite to review from a journal that desk rejected your own submission a few days prior 🎉🥳

Tae Seok Moon @taeseokmoon.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I came back to the United States, hearing about a very sad news: Craig Venter passed away today. He is a pioneer, successfully sequenced the first Human genome, and tried to create Synthetic Cells. We lost a giant in Science. RIP. @jcvi.org

Vaughn Cooper @vscooper.micropopbio.org · 3mo ago

Ok this is hilarious 😂 Be the C diff Watch out Cavs! It’s not gonna be pretty!

Jan Claesen @claesengroup.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Yay Belgium 😜

Max Berger@maxberger.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The US has the fewest parties represented in our national legislature of any country in the industrialized world. We don't just need better candidates--we need a new political system with more parties.

Nichole Broderick, PhD @nabroderick.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Excited to announce our new journal from @isme-microbes.bsky.social ISME Host Microbe is live and now accepting submissions. Look forward to receiving your papers! #Microsky 🧫 🦠

Image of the cover of the 1st volume of ISME Host Microbe a new official journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology. Cover images shows a plant stomata with bacteria around and entering.

Jan Claesen @claesengroup.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I have a gut microbiome joke, but it's actually pretty shit.

Laurel Oldach@laureloldach.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I have a multiomics joke but I can't quite line it up.

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 5mo ago

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology. We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review

The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

journals.plos.org

@nicoleeavalon.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The MIBiG 5.0 Annotathon is coming soon, and registration is now open! 🧬 Does your research involve biosynthetic gene clusters? Do you love natural product biosynthesis? Do you have an interest in rare & exotic enzymes? We can use your help & expertise. Register here 👉 forms.gle/C1cWcLHtrjT2...

Ruth Isenberg, PhD @ruthlessruth15.bsky.social · 6mo ago

A fabulous undergraduate researcher I mentor is graduating this spring and is looking for a job as a lab technician! She's interested in bacterial pathogenesis and is planning to go to grad school after getting more research experience. Please let me know if you or anyone you know is hiring!

Jotham Suez (SuezLab@JHU)@suez.bsky.social · 6mo ago

It's increasingly clear that commensal viruses play important roles in human health, but how do you study them? Our review "Tools and approaches to study the human gut virome: from the bench to bioinformatics" is out today in mSystems! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @haleybiont.bsky.social

A figure from the paper that provides an overview of available culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches for characterizing the human gut virome. Both culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches should be used to study the gut virome. At the bench, many protocols have been adapted to enrich viruses in a sample and isolate them using a sensitive host. Once a virus is isolated, various assays can be used to characterize how the virus interacts with its bacterial host. On the command line, viral genomes can be predicted and viral taxonomy can be identified within a sample. Once procured, multiple tools can be used to annotate viral genomes for predicted gene content and viral lifestyle and predict bacterial host taxonomy.

Ran Blekhman @blekhman.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Our new paper, where we use metabolic modeling to show Fusobacterium grows faster in colorectal tumor vs normal tissue microenvironments, and use computational + experimental approach to find specific metabolic pathways driving host-microbiome interactions in cancer www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year. That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027. A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications. A short 🧵

Exclusive: key NIH review panels due to lose all members by the end of 2026

Thirteen of the agency’s advisory councils, which must review grant applications before funding is awarded, are on track to have no voting members.

nature.com

Arcadia Science @arcadiascience.com · 7mo ago

A free, open-access library of high-quality organism illustrations for science communication

We create vector graphics of model organisms and emerging biological research organisms to enhance our publications. We’re sharing these editable graphics under a CC0 license for other scientists to...

doi.org

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 9mo ago

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below.

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time.

1. The four-fold drain

1.2 Time
The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce,
with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure
1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material
has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs,
grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for
profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time.
The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million
unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of
peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting
widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the
authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many
review demands.
Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of
scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in
‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow
progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to
volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier,
local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with
limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging
with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks
intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below:

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised
scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers
first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour
resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Jan Claesen @claesengroup.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Ruin a book with a car: Ford of the rings

Jo@moartoast.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Ruin a book with a car: The Old Man and the C-Class