🎓 I am recruiting PhD students through the current Vienna BioCenter PhD Programme call. If you are interested in inter-organ communication, whole-body imaging or systemic disease biology, apply here: training.vbc.ac.at/phd-program/

New preprint from PhD student Yu Sun. TSR1 is a TIR effector specialised for CRISPR defence. It is an obligate dimer activated by cA3 and degrades its own activator using a ring nuclease domain. Perhaps the first confirmed dimeric TIR effector? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

BFVD v3 contains 5.8M viral protein structures, 16× more than v2; 75% high quality, filling a major gap in AFDB coverage. It fully covers 72.6% of reference proteomes and spans 72.7% of ICTV species. Great work by @eunbelivable.bsky.social et al. 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🌐 bfvd.foldseek.com

Happy to share our publication on MicroClaw, an AI agent that turns natural language requests into operations on any microscope controlled by Micro-Manager: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... The software is single-click installable (download and click install.bat) at github.com/Micro-Claw/m....

Microscope control with a natural language agent

Microscopy underpins modern biology, but acquiring high-quality data from complex experiments at scale remains challenging. Smart microscopy can standardize and automate data collection, but each expe...

biorxiv.org

This application closes on Sept 15! If you're interested in a computational postdoc position in my lab, please apply here! Lots of fun science :)

Jason Nomburg@jnoms.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I am hiring a computational postdoctoral fellow or bioinformatics scientist! Please apply here if interested, or share with anyone who may be. This position will be following up on our work studying the virus-host conflict. Reposts appreciated! aithyra.onlyfy.jobs/en/job/v2gwu...

🚨 We are excited to share the first preprint of our lab ! We discovered an NADase enzymatic domain in bacterial immunity and in the human protein TEP1. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A widespread NADase domain links bacterial immunity with human TEP1

Recent discoveries on bacterial immunity have revealed that several protein domains involved in anti-phage defense are conserved in eukaryotes, such as SIRim, TIR, PNP and gasdermin. Bacterial immune ...

biorxiv.org

I'm very excited to share that this January, I’ll be joining Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences as a tenure-track Assistant Professor 🏙️🦁🍎 @columbiauniversity.bsky.social 🧬 Learn more: dohertylab.org Thank you to all those who supported me along the way!

Doherty lab at Columbia University | immune signaling | Sherman Fairchild Center, 1212 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027, USA

We treat viral antagonism as a discovery tool for host biology to reveal fundamental mechanisms of immune signaling and new opportunities for therapeutic intervention.

dohertylab.org

Foldseek-Interface enables fast search/clustering of the protein interface universe! We clustered 3.1M PDB dimers into 77,167 groups and found new interfaces keep appearing even as fold discovery plateaus. 🧵 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🔎 search.foldseek.com/interface 🌐 interface.foldseek.com

Check out our paper on ESCRTs in large DNA viruses. Most enveloped viruses use the host #ESCRT for envelopment, but only mirusviruses and nucleocytoviricots encode it! Congrats @sonaida.bsky.social, @tomdelmont.bsky.social, Ulysse Guyet & Eugene Koonin. @pasteur.fr www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Large eukaryotic DNA viruses encode ESCRT machinery for membrane remodelling - Nature Microbiology

A genomic screen reveals homologues of ESCRT components in mirusviruses that infect unicellular aquatic eukaryotes.

nature.com

🎉 Our first paper from the Querques lab is out! We uncover the molecular checkpoints controlling cut-and-paste transposition by CRISPR-associated transposons. Congrats to Mateusz & the whole team! 🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41... @univie.ac.at @meduniwien.ac.at

Max Perutz Labs Vienna@maxperutzlabs.ac.at · 4w ago

Paper alert! 📢 The @irmaquerques.bsky.social lab, with Mateusz Walter as co-first author, reveals in @natcomms.nature.com the molecular checkpoints that control how and when CRISPR-associated transposons move DNA ➡️ tinyurl.com/4mzkhwz6 @univie.ac.at @meduniwien.ac.at

Today we are excited to introduce you to PanDA 🐼🐼🐼, a newly uncovered antiphage system!! Attendees at @SISB2026 would have heard a little about this from graduate student Ali Nabhani back in May, but we are now out here in preprint form and delighted to share more of the details. (Thread below)

Minimal diadenylate cyclases have been co-opted to detect phage immune evasion

Many bacterial immune defenses transmit recognition of phage infection via the generation of diverse cyclic nucleotide second messengers. Phage have evolved to subvert this kind of immunity by sequest...

biorxiv.org

The shared principles of human and bacterial antiviral immunity An honor to highlight remarkable discoveries from many labs over the past 12 years that unite previously disparate fields of how animal cells and prokaryotes defend against viruses. www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/fzwyB

Shared principles of human and bacterial antiviral immunity - Nature

The Review describes shared ancient, conserved mechanisms between human antiviral immunity and bacterial anti-phage systems, outlining universal principles of pathogen sensing, signalling and effector...

nature.com

I will be opening my research group at the Max Delbrück Center later this year to unravel the principles governing the unique context sensing capacity of the liver www.mdc-berlin.de/schwayer and am looking for enthusiastic PhD applicants.

Schwayer Lab

The mammalian liver possesses a regenerative capacity that is unmatched by any other organ. Following injury, liver epithelial cells can proliferate or even change their identity, enabling the organ t...

mdc-berlin.de

The Nomburg Lab at #AITHYRA is seeking a motivated POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW or BIOINFORMATICS SCIENTIST (all genders) to join the interdisciplinary team that combines AI, structural biol, & high-throughput molecular virology to decode the virus-host conflict. aithyra.at/about/open-p... until 15.9.2026

1st genome sequenced (Sanger 1977), 1st genome synthesised (Venter 2003), 1st genome + proteome fully mutated (Huijin Xiangua 2026!) @crg.eu @sangerinstitute.bsky.social Complete Mutagenesis of the Genome and Proteome of ΦX174 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Complete Mutagenesis of the Genome and Proteome of ΦX174

The bacteriophage ΦX174 was the first genome to be sequenced and the first to be chemically synthesised. Here we present a complete map of the consequences of changing every nucleotide in the ΦX174 ge...

biorxiv.org

Check out our new article if you are interested in disorder-mediated protein interactions, AlphaFold-based structural modeling and variant characterization: Https://rdcu.be/fw2oz Dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41594-026-01846-z

Variant characterization in the intrinsically disordered human proteome - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology

Proteome-wide prediction and structural modeling of disordered protein interaction interfaces advance characterization of disease-associated variants in disordered protein regions.

dx.doi.org

I am hiring a computational postdoctoral fellow or bioinformatics scientist! Please apply here if interested, or share with anyone who may be. This position will be following up on our work studying the virus-host conflict. Reposts appreciated! aithyra.onlyfy.jobs/en/job/v2gwu...

Postdoctoral Fellow or Bioinformatics Scientist, Nomburg Lab (all genders)

About AITHYRAAITHYRA is a pioneering biomedical research institute in Vienna, Austria, where artificial intelligence meets life sciences to drive the next biological revolution. AITHYRA is an institut

aithyra.onlyfy.jobs

Jason Nomburg@jnoms.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Ad forthcoming, but I am hiring for a postdoc or staff scientist to advance related investigations of the virus-host conflict. This position is ~80-100% computational, but with opportunities for experimental work if desired. If interested, shoot me an email with your CV! Reposts appreciated! 15/15

Nature research paper: Diverse bacterial pattern recognition receptors sense the core phage proteome go.nature.com/45fpXCZ

Diverse bacterial pattern recognition receptors sense the core phage proteome - Nature

Systematic analysis of prokaryotic STAND NTPases — relatives of animal and plant immune receptors — uncovers diverse antiviral sensors that detect most of the core structural and replicative proteins of bacteriophages.

go.nature.com

Come work on exciting AI for biology projects in Paris!! 🇫🇷 Details and application below, deadline sept 1st!

Antigen Evolution & Design Lab@antigenevo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨 JOB ALERT🚨 We are very excited to be hiring the lab's ✨very first postdoc✨! Work on new AI technologies for decoding antigen protein evolution in a fresh research environment, at the heart of Paris 🇫🇷 Details & link to apply: research.pasteur.fr/en/job/postd... Deadline: Sep 1st

Happy to share the first preprint out of the Nomburg lab! Many aspects of cellular immunity are shared across the tree of life. Here, we show that some of these conserved aspects of cellular immunity are mirrored by conserved effectors of immune antagonism. Thread below! 1/15

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Conserved folds enable immune antagonism across the tree of life https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.21.739742v1

1/4 Every good defence needs a backup! 🛡️⚔ Out now in @natrevmicro.nature.com our Comment on "𝗶𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝗳𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴"! 🎉 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Immune safeguarding as a conserved principle of antiviral defence - Nature Reviews Microbiology

All organisms defend against viral infections through active immunity mechanisms that clear the virus or population-level mechanisms that cause regulated cell death. Recent research increasingly shows...

nature.com

Out @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social, natural products meet bacterial immunity! We used genomics to identify lanthivirins: a family of >2,000 lanthipeptide BGCs that protect Actinobacteria against phages. Led by @hshomar.bsky.social & @mariegllm.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A family of lanthipeptides with anti-phage function

Bacteria produce natural products to adapt to their environments, with phage interactions as major ecological and evolutionary drivers. While some nat…

sciencedirect.com

A new PAMP, a new innate immunity principle and a new preclinical application. I am so pleased to share our study on STING activation mechanisms in health and disease. Led by the fantastic Stephanie Ragland, follow the link below for a summary of all we learned. www.cell.com/immunity/ful...

Purine and pyrimidine-based bacterial cyclic dinucleotides egress the phagosome and activate the innate immune sensor STING

Innate immune recognition of bacteria is thought to center on cell-surface or endosomal pattern recognition receptors such as TLRs. Ragland et al. identify an intraphagosomal cyclic dinucleotide (CDN)...

cell.com

First paper with the lab's affiliation!! ✨✨ summarising some of the cool concepts that the Antigen Evolution & Design Lab will be working on! Together with amazing collaborators @mghafari.bsky.social and @grovearmada.bsky.social www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Studying the Deep Evolution of Viruses in the Era of Artificial Intelligence Structure Prediction

High mutation rates erode viral sequence similarity, obscuring deep evolutionary history. While protein structure is far more conserved than sequence, its use in evolutionary studies has historically ...

annualreviews.org

It annoyed us that annotation tools aren't great at saying "I just don't know". That's a real problem for metagenomes and non-model organisms, where it usually means picking some threshold and hoping for the best. We built FAMUS to try and fix this. doi.org/10.64898/202... 1/8

FAMUS: A Few-Shot Learning Framework for Large-Scale Protein Annotation

Predicting gene function is a pivotal and challenging step in genomic and metagenomic data analysis. Current automatic annotation tools typically rely on the single most similar sequence from the quer...

doi.org

Now online! A viral ORFeome library for systems-level genetic dissection of host-pathogen interactions

A viral ORFeome library for systems-level genetic dissection of host-pathogen interactions

A scalable library of ∼13,000 barcoded viral open reading frames from >500 viral species enables functional genomic screens across the virome. Applying this platform identified viral regulators of cellular proliferation, antigen presentation, and interferon signaling. This platform enables systematic exploration of viral protein function.

dlvr.it

Humans and bacteria share strategies to defend against viruses. We wondered: could they use each other's genes? Yes, both can! Bacteria can use human immune genes to defend against phages AND Human cells can use bacterial genes for viral defense. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Bacterial and human exonucleases mediate interkingdom antiviral immunity

All kingdoms of life have developed strategies to limit viral infection. In humans, interferons induce a suite of antiviral factors that collectively provide immunity. Some human immune genes are homo...

biorxiv.org

Awesome! Congratulations Alex, looking forward to reading

Alexander Price@pricelesssci.bsky.social · 3mo ago

RNA splicing was discovered in adenovirus almost 50 years ago. In our lab's first pre-print we have turned that relationship around, showing that viruses dependence on the cell's splicing machinery leads to a hidden vulnerability that can be targeted with drugs already in human clinical trials.

How do human cells defend against viruses? @sgfern.bsky.social discovers that human immune proteins named ISGs target ancient features of replication shared between animal and bacterial viruses – opening analysis of human immunity to the power of bacterial genetics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Do you enjoy the thrill of discovery? Does this photo give you good vibes? Then you might be the right person to join our lab! Current projects range from chloroplast transcription to thylakoid membrane remodeling & we would be happy to welcome bright and motivated people at all career stages!