I'm looking for an enthusiastic student to join my team as a PhD candidate on archaeal genome evolution 🦠💻 Work in beautiful Utrecht, at @binfutrecht.bsky.social, an international group full of caring, amazing scientists, and with frequent cake breaks! www.uu.nl/en/organisat... Please share! 🙏

📢 Registration for our International Symposium on “New Concepts in Prokaryotic Virus-Host Interactions” is now open! 🗓️ 5–7 October 2026 📍 Harnack House, Berlin, Germany ➡️ Information and registration: spp2330.de/symposium-20...

Happy to share our latest pre-print on the Druantia defense system. We find that Type III Druantia uses a cooperative helicase-nuclease mechanism to sense and degrade replication-associated forked DNA structures. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A🧵

#SISB2026 was fantastic! A big thanks to the organisers - super inspiring event!

Naama Aviram@naamaaviram.bsky.social · 3mo ago

That's a wrap on three days of incredible science at #SISB2026! Special thanks to @rockefeller.edu for hosting us on their beautiful campus, to our speakers and poster presenters, and most of all to this community that never fails to inspire. Can't wait for #SISB2027 🫶

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 share the first preprint from the lab! We show that ApeA defends against RNA phage infection by cleaving the phage genome: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Polish phage science meets Polish visual storytelling 🇵🇱🦠 To celebrate our last paper, we collaborated with an artist who previously worked on The Witcher 3 — to create a comic about phages and why understanding them matters in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Comic below 👇

Rafal Mostowy@rafalmostowy.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🎉 New in @plosbiology.org: Temperate phages of Klebsiella pneumoniae show capsule-driven host tropism — but how? The working assumption was depolymerases: enzymes that chew through the bacterial sugar capsule. Turns out that's not the whole story. 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

PostDoc position available! (links in post below) Feel free to share!

Our paper is out! Hiding in plain sight among Cas12a nucleases, Cas12a3 cleaves not its RNA target but the 3′ ends of tRNA. Huge thanks to all who made this possible, especially the Beisel lab, Biao & Dirk for the structure, & @sebastianglatt.bsky.social for all things tRNA. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

RNA-triggered Cas12a3 cleaves tRNA tails to execute bacterial immunity - Nature

Cas12a3 nucleases constitute a distinct clade of type V CRISPR–Cas bacterial immune systems that preferentially cleave the 3′ tails of tRNAs after recognition of target RNA to induce growth arres...

nature.com

VERY much looking forward to cool science at the next edition of the Symposium of Immune Sytems of Bacteria in New York in 2026! Hope to see many of you there 🥳

Joe Bondy-Denomy@jbdsf.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Check this out for the 2026 SISB (phage defense) meeting in NYC. Mark your calendar! (and note the Zoom option, if needed) sisb2026.rockefeller.edu

📢 We have multiple open PhD positions to study bacterial immune systems using cutting-edge cryo-EM, microbiology, and biochemistry in our group! Join us and uncover how bacterial defenses eliminate predators and engineer next-gen biotech tools. 🔥 Apply by Jan 8, 2026 Details: phd.pages.ista.ac.at

Lab’s first paper is out!! We show the first structures of #Asgard #chromatin by #cryo-EM 🧬❄️ Asgard histones form closed and open hypernucleosomes. Closed are conserved across #Archaea, while open resemble eukaryotic H3–H4 octasomes and are Asgard-specific. More here: www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

One week left to apply!!

Luuk Loeff@lloeff.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Hiring! 🧬🔬 Ever wondered how bacteria fight off viruses? We’re looking for a PhD student to dive into the molecular basis of newly discovered microbial immune systems, an area of biology where much remains to be uncovered. RT/share to help us find our next team member! www.lumc.nl/en/about-lum...

BindCraft can be used to design synthetic protein binders with incredible accuracy and success rate - Out now in Nature. BindCraft displays perfectly how AI-based tools can be used to accelerate biological research (and clinical applications). I think this is a must-read paper.

Martin Pacesa@martinpacesa.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Exciting to see our protein binder design pipeline BindCraft published in its final form in @Nature ! This has been an amazing collaborative effort with Lennart, Christian, @sokrypton.org, Bruno and many other amazing lab members and collaborators. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fantastic work, congrats Anna! These filaments are so cool :)

Anna Kanevskaya@annakanevskaya.bsky.social · last yr.

News from the world of pAgos: We explored a distinct clade of short pAgos associated with HNH nuclease partners, which we named SPARHA, and discovered that they protect bacteria from phages and plasmids via abortive infection. Upon activation, SPARHA oligomerizes, forming filaments. A long 🧵

Out now: Cyanobacterial Argonautes and Cas4 family nucleases cooperate to interfere with invading DNA cell.com/molecular-ce... Most long-A pAgos interfere with invading DNA solo. Why then are cyanobacterial pAgos co-encoded with a Cas4-like protein?

Bioinformatics junior group leader position in Lund, specialising in infection and/or epidemiology. These are really nice positions with generous support. Please spread the word to anyone who might be interested in becoming our colleague! lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Associate Senior Lecturer (DDLS fellow) in data driven epidemiology and biology of infection

Lund is strategically positioned close to the continent, hosting major national and European research infrastructures, such as MAX.IV Laboratory and the European Spallation Source (ESS). In the field

lu.varbi.com

Congratulations to LS1 #ERC grantees @dcswarts.bsky.social and Geert van den Bogaart @unigroningen.bsky.social for their POC grants! 🥳 🥳 🥳 🥳 🥳#ERCPoC erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

134 researchers supported to turn their science into practice

In the final round of the 2024 European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept grant competition, 134 projects will receive support, bringing the total number of grants awarded under the 2024 work pr...

erc.europa.eu

Excited to have been awarded an ERC Proof-of-Concept grant to further explore the possibilities to use prokaryotic Argonautes for diagnostics applications! 🥳

🚨New review🚨 Evolution and ecology of anti-defence systems in phages and plasmids Link: www.cell.com/current-biol...

What a great way to end the year! ✨ Today in @cellpress.bsky.social we report the structure and function of the Shedu anti-phage defense system. tinyurl.com/4crj6dnx A long 🧵...

Distribution of bacterial DNA repair proteins and their co-occurrence with immune systems (cell.com/cell-reports... It started with a simple question: Are certain prokaryotic immune systems always (or never) encoded with specific DNA repair proteins?...