Excited to be selected as one of the inaugural projects under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI. Our project, MOBILE-PATH, will develop AI-driven approaches to understand and predict horizontal gene transfer in microbial communities.

Princeton University@princeton.edu · 2w ago

Princeton University faculty members Hantao Ji, Egemen Kolemen, @electromicrobe.bsky.social and Jürgen Hackl have been awarded grants to lead projects in the Genesis Mission, a nationwide initiative encompassing 278 projects to harness AI for scientific discovery.

Excited to share the first research paper from my group. This work started when I was a visiting postdoc at the @cemau.bsky.social and was a great collaboration with @kartiksaiyer.bsky.social developing artificial sediment matrices that support the growth of freshwater cable bacteria.

Kartik Aiyer@kartiksaiyer.bsky.social · 3w ago

Happy to share our new paper on cable bacteria. Motivated by the lack of pure cultures, we developed a standardized artificial sediment system that supports repeated cultivation of freshwater and marine cable bacteria under controlled conditions. Link: doi.org/10.1093/isme...

We're looking for a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join our group to work on a team-oriented protein engineering project building light-controlled DNA polymerases lnkd.in/eDhBxpSj

The paper on my Ph.D. work is fully online! We used a ribozyme that barcodes 16S rRNA to track the transduction range of phage P1 in a synthetic community and real wastewater communities, while diving deeper into the unique range conferred by P1s two tail fibers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cross-order detection of bacteriophage transduction in microbial communities using RNA barcoding - Nature Communications

Bacteriophages are the most abundant life form on earth and can be applied to eliminate or engineer bacteria. Here, authors demonstrate RNA barcoding as a high throughput tool to measure bacteriophage...

nature.com

Our lab is proud to present our latest work harnessing Bridge Recombinase for genome-scale editing in diverse bacteria, microbiome editing, and programmable horizontal gene transfer.

bioRxiv Synthetic Biology@biorxiv-synthbio.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Bridge recombinase enables versatile rewriting of bacterial genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.29.721476v1

Glad to see our paper published in Nature Communications We discovered how novel marine microorganisms interact via geoconductors to produce methane. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Live thread of the NSF biology virtual office hour: 🧵

Impact of tiny anoxic pockets in #Nitrogen loss on sandy shores!! Our newly developed #microfluidic method revealed #microorganisms on sand grains create anoxic microenvironments allowing #denitrification in well-oxygenated sands www.mpi-bremen.de/en/Nitrogen-... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today's reading: Nature should be the model for microbial sciences journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... by @brettbakker.bsky.social @emilyraehyde.bsky.social and @pedroleao.bsky.social Looks ideal for a talk I am working on on model organisms ...

Nature should be the model for microbial sciences | Journal of Bacteriology

Historically, our understanding of microbes has been based on laboratory cultures. Much of what we know at a mechanistic level is based on “model organisms” which are species that readily grow in labo...

journals.asm.org

Iron reduction under oxic conditions by Microbacterium deferre sp. nov. A1-JKT www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Iron reduction under oxic conditions by Microbacterium deferre sp. nov. A1-JKT - Nature Communications

In this study, the authors show that Microbacterium deferre A1-JK, a newly isolated Gram-positive bacterium, simultaneously reduces oxygen and iron under oxic conditions, revealing unexpected microbia...

nature.com

We're hiring! Do you have experience engineering yeast and using CRISPR? Jose Avalos and I are hiring a joint postdoc to work on an exciting fast-paced DARPA project with a great team at Neochromosome, Fermeate, and @joepeterslab.bsky.social puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬 Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

I made a survey over at Mastodon and found that Fusilli are mostly right-handed spirals, but about a third of the brands is left-handed. So far there seems to be no racemic Fusilli brand. Pasta producerst have achieved a degree of enantiomeric purity chemists can only dream of. 🧪 #chemsky

Lars Fischer@fischblog.bsky.social · last yr.

What about pasta salad? Are Fusilli enantiomerically pure? And if so, are there brands which sell D-Fusilli and others that sell L-Fusilli? Has anyone ever researched that? #chemsky 🧪

Very excited to share a manuscript at the heart of my PhD! We added an RNA-memory device (RAM) to phage P1 to identify transduction hosts in synthetic and wastewater microbial communities in high throughput. Also, I am on the post-doc market, so please reach out if interested! 1/6 t.ly/a8k9O

Cross-order detection of bacteriophage transduction in communities using ribosomal RNA barcoding

Bacteriophages (phages) facilitate gene transfer and microbial evolution in all ecosystems and have applications as tools for engineering microbiomes and as antimicrobials. Historic efforts to map pha...

t.ly

I'd like to share a little bit of happy lab news in these chaotic times: a new preprint, driven by the brilliant Qinhao Cao! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We address a big challenge in synbio: If you give me a protein "X", how can I give you a version of X whose activity is controlled by a kinase?

Detailed and concise 1-pager explaining what F&A does and how it underlies the competitive advantages of American sciences. F&A pays PEOPLE and allows universities to be the anchors of regional economies that they are! 🔗 www.cogr.edu/sites/defaul...

The Center for Electromicrobiology (@cemau.bsky.social) has just joined BlueSky! This is the @dg.dk Center for Excellence at @aarhusuni.bsky.social. Follow @cemau.bsky.social for news about cable bacteria!

Great way to start off 2025. Thanks to @kunjapur.bsky.social for organizing. Looking forward to the next one! #MASBN

Aditya Kunjapur@kunjapur.bsky.social · 2y ago

We're excited to hear about electromicrobiology from @electromicrobe.bsky.social who recently started his lab @princetonupress.bsky.social #MASBN #synbio

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us in Hawaiʻi for the first International SynBYSS Conference! It was a successful and dynamic 4 days filled with insightful science, networking and fun.

Why did an engineer become a researcher in biological evolution? My esteemed research partner, colleague, and friend, Masaru K. Nobu, is sharing some side stories about strain MK-D1 research. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Engineering history with Asgard archaea of the kingdom Promethearchaeati - Nature Microbiology

Multiple histories converge in Masaru Nobu’s story of culturing an archaeon closely related to us eukaryotes.

nature.com

The field of "biochemical genetics", as they called it.

Brian Krueger, PhD@h2so4hurts.bsky.social · 2y ago

The field of molecular biology was born in 1941 through the marriage of genetics and biochemistry. 🧪 🧬 #histSci

Conversation with the brilliant contemporary microbiologist and molecular biologist—HHMI and MacArthur Fellow Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University Pioneer in the chemical signaling mechanisms that bacteria use to communicate with each other known as “quorum sensing” www.hhmi.org/news/tapping...

Tapping into Bacterial Conversations | HHMI

Over the course of 30 years, HHMI Investigator Bonnie Bassler has helped usher in a new branch of science centered on quorum sensing, the process by which bacteria communicate with one another and orc...

hhmi.org