Sunday evening, strolling along the river Lahn, beer in hand. Still cannot escape coot

I say this lovingly of my country of residence, but I’ve notice that it seems like a lot of German pop culture is borrowed from Britain and America with a delay of about twenty years. Here we find a band that has discovered the asthetic of circa-2009 Coldplay

I just noticed that the images on the covers are cofactors with blue bubbles as background. Until now, I assumed they were images from Coot. Then I thought “what kind of weird protein has *all three* hydrogenase active site metallocofaftors?”

Duncan Kountz@dkountz.bsky.social · 2w ago

Just arrrived in the mail

Just arrrived in the mail

Back in the US for the first time since the move to Germany. Reunited with my cat, who has settled in with my parents and seems very happy. It’s the longest time she and I have been apart in her 13 year life

1/ Happy to share our preprint! The Mtr complex catalyses the second-to-last step of the methanogenesis and is an essential bioenergetic machine in most methanogenic archaea. Anaerobic cryo-EM of Mtr reveals a nitrogenase-like metallocluster bound at its active site! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I’ll take “animals I wasn’t expecting to see in Germany for $1000”

Skimming a paper about methylotrophic methanogens and the gut and kept seeing “NMR” in the figures and the text. Of course, my brain went right to “oh they have a lot of metabolite/metabolomic data”. Turns out, NMR sounds stood for “naked mole rat”, whose gut microbiome was being studied

Question for the microbial ecologists out there: do you make a terminological distinction between a microbiome and its associated environment? For clarity, the next post in this thread provides the sentence I'm writing/editing that this question is related to.

1/ Excited to share our preprint! 🥳 Degradation of aromatic compounds, including BTEX pollutants, requires highly endergonic aromatic ring reduction. Using #cryoEM and in situ #cryoET, we show how BCRII couples electron bifurcation modules in one giant redox machine www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How do “LEGO-like” electron-bifurcating modules combine to drive degradation in BTEX-contaminated ecosystems? Check out our latest preprint, where we use cryo-EM and cryo-ET to reveal how the 1 MDa BCRII complex powers extremely endergonic aromatic ring reduction. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Jack Szostak "All of these things frighten me, and they should frighten you as well. I made the decision to create a life for myself here, because I viewed this as a place that rewarded determination, hard work, and integrity. It still has a chance to be that place again."

I’m a Nobel Prize-winning immigrant. I can no longer recognize this country.

Attacks on science and immigrants are destroying America.

open.substack.com

I just completely fell for something that I initially thought was satire because it was so crazy. On further inspection, it was actually satire.

Just got an email from my grad school’s Graduate Research Fund asking me to donate. The really amusing part is that the email addresses me as “Mr. Kountz”. I mean, if there was any organization that should know that I have a PhD…

Okay methanogen people (and particularly Methanococcus people): Does anyone have access to this publication?: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... If you do, could you DM me so I can send you my email (and then you could send me the pdf?)

Isolation and characterization of 22 mesophilic methanococci

Twenty-two strains of mesophilic methanococci were isolated from salt marsh and other intertidal sediments of the southeastern United States. All the …

sciencedirect.com

A genetic toolkit for the human gut bacterium Mediterraneibacter gnavus identifies capsular polysaccharides as a competitive colonization factor www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 I was waiting for this paper for a while 🥳 Our new paper in @pnas.org shows that ATP synthase drastically alters membrane properties related to proton diffusion. Funded by @volkswagenstiftung.de www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

ATP synthase activity boosts membrane proton acceptance and lateral diffusion | PNAS

In most organisms, ATP synthesis is powered by the proton motive force (pmf) and catalyzed by ATP synthase. While the chemiosmotic theory originall...

pnas.org

"My motto is: just do it!" We love this interview w/ Maren Nattermann, Research Group Leader @ Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, on Marjory Stephenson (1885–1948), pioneer of chemical microbiology as well as her own path into science www.mpg.de/26210626/mar... #IWD2026

"There isn't one 'single right way' for a career - and it doesn’t have to be a straight line"

Maren Nattermann, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, on Marjory Stephenson (1885–1948): pioneer of chemical microbiology, whose work on bacterial metabolic...

mpg.de

Happy to share our new paper on proton transfer in metalloenzymes, out now in @pccp.rsc.org! Exploiting crystallography, electrochemistry, FTIR spectroscopy, and QM calculations we identified a Zundel ion in the catalytic proton tranfer pathway of [FeFe]-hydrogenase. doi.org/10.1039/D5CP...

Maybe this is just me, but whenever someone says Mossbauer I think of the book Mossflower in the Redwall series. I can’t be the only one.

So excited to share our cryo-EM study of the nitrogenase cofactor assembly scaffold NifEN expressed in E. coli! @ribbehulab.bsky.social @ucibiosci.bsky.social @natcatal.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Structural insights into metallocluster trafficking in the nitrogenase assembly scaffold NifEN - Nature Catalysis

Structural insights into the assembly of the complex nitrogenase cofactor are scarce. Now, cryo-EM and AlphaFold analyses of NifEN, which converts the precursor (L-cluster) to a mature cofactor (M-clu...

nature.com

Today, I inoculated a methanogen culture for the first time in at least 10 years. Believe it or not

Pretty allosteric regulation data from a manuscript I'm writing on my PhD work. Red and blue data are from two alternative substrates. Filled symbols = absence of allosteric regulator. Open symbols: presence of allosteric regulator. X-axis is mM substrate

I’ve had a really positive experience in Germany so far, but from time to time I get a deep feeling of sadness from being so far from home. Not a new thing for a human to experience of course

Evolutionary bioenergetics of sporulation "energetic cost of sporulation in units of ATP by integrating time-resolved genome, transcriptome, and proteome profiles" #Bsubtilis #MicroSky #PNAS by @ckarakoc.bsky.social @shoestrapped.bsky.social @jaytlennon.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Evolutionary bioenergetics of sporulation | PNAS

Energy is required for the expression and maintenance of complex traits. In many habitats, however, free energy available to support biosynthesis i...

pnas.org

Does anyone know a good commercial source of rumen fluid in Europe (Germany in particular)? Maybe I just need to start cultivating a relationship with farmers...

From Joe Krzycki's, Bing Hao's and @djferguson.bsky.social 's labs: Delineation of the Active Site of MtgB, a Cobalamin-dependent Glycine Betaine Methyltransferase www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Delineation of the Active Site of MtgB, a Cobalamin-dependent Glycine Betaine Methyltransferase

The MttB superfamily member MtgB catalyzes the methylation of a cognate corrinoid protein with glycine betaine and representatives have been described…

sciencedirect.com

Das wetter ist sehr schlecht. Es schneit hefting und ich bin kalt

One of the perks of living in Marburg is that you can email Rolf Thauer and be like “remember me? want to get coffee?” and he’s just like “yes” and suggests a place that like 300 ft from your appartment

Fantastic team effort of several groups in the SPP2002 @dfg.de and a brilliant PhD - Eva Herdering in the Kiel team @schmitzstreitslab.bsky.social

FEMS Journals@femsjournals.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🧬 Dive into the small proteome of Methanosarcina mazei (across 5 conditions)! A key resource by @schmitzstreitslab.bsky.social @uni-kiel.de for uncovering #smallproteins functions, motifs and proteoforms in #archaea. 👉 buff.ly/HJOi3E0