Glad to share this new Microbial Primer on Mirror Biology written w/ Jolien Sweere. It's free to all in the @microbiologysociety.org journal Microbiology, edited by Steve Diggle. Thanks for this opportunity to outline our scientific knowledge of this significant topic. doi.org/10.1099/mic....

Norwegian fish farms polluting fjords with waste likened to ‘raw sewage of millions of people’

Norwegian fish farms polluting fjords with waste likened to ‘raw sewage of millions of people’

Exclusive: ‘Fish sludge’ in coastal waters now has nutrient levels equivalent to those in untreated effluent of country the size of Australia, report finds Norwegian fish farms are filling fjords and other coastal waters with nutrient pollution equivalent to the raw sewage of tens of millions of people each year, a report has found. Norway is the largest farmed salmon producer in the world, and nutrients in fish feed are excreted directly into coastal waters. Analysis from the Sunstone Institute found that Norwegian aquaculture released 75,000 tonnes of nitrogen, 13,000 tonnes of phosphorus and 360,000 tonnes of organic carbon in 2025. Continue reading...

theguardian.com

Confirmed in post 🎉 passed probation and made permanent at Queen’s, woohoo! (Perhaps not the usual sense of relief given the current HE environment…. But nice nonetheless)

PhD opportunity! Join us in St Andrews to study the consequences of defence against conjugative plasmids (preprint coming soon on this!). Funded by EASTBIO, co-supervised by @mfwhite2.bsky.social. Please share & pass on to anyone interested! 🦠🧫 Deadline 16th November www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Eastbio: Mechanism and consequences of lethal zygosis in bacteria restricting AMR plasmids. at University of St Andrews on FindAPhD.com

PhD Project - Eastbio: Mechanism and consequences of lethal zygosis in bacteria restricting AMR plasmids. at University of St Andrews, listed on FindAPhD.com

findaphd.com

Three books. One artist. No AI. (And a whole load of dinosaurs). #SciArt dragonsofwales.etsy.com/listing/1689...

EX|TERRA - Complete Collection Dinosaur Books - Etsy

This Art & Photography Books item by DragonsofWales has 484 favorites from Etsy shoppers. Ships from United Kingdom. Listed on Aug 27, 2026

dragonsofwales.etsy.com

Proud PI-moment - well deserved Lavisha

New Concepts in Prokaryotic Virus-Host Interaction@spp2330.bsky.social · 3d ago

Lavisha Parab receiving the FEMS microLife poster award for her outstanding poster presentation on “Need for speed: early lysogen formation following rapid lysis drives temperate phages persistence”. Congratulations! @lavishaparab.bsky.social @femsjournals.bsky.social

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com

We have a position open in our core facility in the @pasteur.fr . Please share it and / or apply! forum.image.sc/t/research-e...

Research engineer in Bioimage Analysis. Institut Pasteur, Image Analysis Hub - 2026

Dear all Below is an announcement for a permanent position as a Research Engineer in the Institut Pasteur, Paris. There is a flyer attached at the bottom. We are looking ideally for a Bioimage An...

forum.image.sc

Annihilation always makes Halloween lists, so I thought I'd do a thread of creepy reads. Starting today with a flat-out modern masterpiece, Max Lury's No Ghosts. Thoroughly contemporary and disturbing grounded in deep characterization, and, in part, outdoing Back Rooms while also its own thing. 1

🚨 We're recruiting! 🚨 Are you interested in antimicrobials and their evolution? Join Me, @coytelab.bsky.social and Tucker Gillman as we build a "silicon colosseum" to model their advantages in bacterial communities! Do share with anyone who might be interested :) willsmithlab.com/2026/10/06/n...

New vacancies opening! - SMITH lab @ Manchester University

Delighted to announce that the lab is recruiting! Bacteria poison prey and rivals using a diverse arsenal of weaponised toxins, spanning a huge diversity of molecular and interaction lengthscales. But...

willsmithlab.com

I am surprised and relieved to see that HHMI has re-opened the Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program this year, after pulling the rug on it last year, *after* applications had been submitted. This program is for postdocs who plan to transition into academic research careers. www.hhmi.org/programs/han...

Cover image alert 🎨🚨👇🏼 - check out the amazing drawing of Sophia Zimmermann from our group in Nature Microbiology @natmicrobiol.nature.com ! Fun fact: Sophia initially drew it as a present to Dorentina @humollidorentina.bsky.social when we celebrated her recent paper on TnSeq with phages 🥂😊.

Dorentina Humolli@humollidorentina.bsky.social · 4d ago

We wrote a short “Behind the Paper” post about our HIDEN-SEQ journey together with @aharms485.bsky.social. Check it out: go.nature.com/4yBHsdy Special to share it with the @natmicrobiol.nature.com cover, featuring the amazing art of the great scientist and artist Sophia Zimmermann from our lab!

Minimoy, the cat we are cat-sitting for the year, is my sabbatical spirit animal

ChatGPT is adding the signatures of real New Yorker cartoonists to its AI-generated images. So far, I've found the signatures of more than 15 contributors. "It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me." www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/chat...

super cool from the @peterfineran.bsky.social et al Defining the essential genome of diverse phages with phage Tn-seq www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Defining the essential genome of diverse phages with phage Tn-seq - Nature Microbiology

Phage Tn-seq uses Tn5 transposon mutagenesis with anti-CRISPR-based selection and deep sequencing as a method to generate unbiased, genome-wide mutations across diverse phages

nature.com

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... New preprint from the lab. We tried to capture phage infection using scRNAseq. With admittedly mixed results. Importantly our reads weren’t random and we see predicted biological patterns. Phage gene expression along the genome for one 1/3

Robust Inference of Phage-Host Infection Dynamics from Sparse Single-Cell Transcriptomics Profiles in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Phage therapy is providing a benefit to a limited number of people. To date those who have received phage therapy typically have done so via an IND expanded access mechanism, colloquially referred to ...

biorxiv.org

Excited that our new paper with @henrylabsymbio.bsky.social and Kerry Oliver is out @pnas.org! We show that mobile genetic elements can spread adaptive host-benefiting traits across heritable insect symbionts on eco-evolutionary timescales.🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Phenotypic divergence is driven by mobile genetic elements in a heritable insect symbiont | PNAS

Heritable microbes profoundly influence insect biology, yet the traits they confer often evolve rapidly and differ among closely related symbiont s...

pnas.org

Nicely executed study on phage anti-defence rdcu.be/M7mrq41uU7Ma

Attention, phage friends! Our new work on predicting phage-host interactions is out in Nature Microbiology since yesterday! 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Phylogeny-agnostic strain-level prediction of phage–host interactions from genomes using machine learning - Nature Microbiology

This platform identifies phages capable of infecting specific bacterial strains using genome sequences alone and could enable rational phage-therapy design and precision microbiome engineering.

nature.com

Forty-six hours to go, and this anthology is barely $100 away from funding! Don't make them come back and try again, and again, and again . . . (Even if it *would* be thematically appropriate.) www.backerkit.com/c/projects/m...

OPPORTUNITY WINDOW: An Anthology of Time Loop Stories

Deja vu doesn't begin to cover it... OPPORTUNITY WINDOW will bring you a book of brand new time loop stories (and maybe some you've seen before) from across the SFFH genres!

backerkit.com

After a collective 28 hours of GPU time, the exosome for MD simulations for our iGEM project is ready. Now to do this exact thing 4 more times for other exosomes.

Introducing your ultimate fighter and champion: Bear 89 Backpack 👑 Thanks for joining us for the biggest Fat Bear Week to date.

Postdoc position available in my group to work on ERC funded project on evolutionary biology of antibiotic resistance. Looking for someone with expertise in bacterial genetics, AMR, and evolutionary biology. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSZ416/p...

Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of Oxford

Explore an exciting academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Don't miss out on other academic jobs. Click to apply and explore more opportunities.

jobs.ac.uk

MAHA's ongoing commitment to radical transparency.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg@sherylnyt.bsky.social · 2w ago

BIG MAHA SUMMIT today at Waldorf-Astoria. Vance and RFK Jr. will speak. I was denied a press credential due to. “limited space. “Here I am getting turned away. I’m 5 feet tall. I don’t take up that much space.

Our latest, spearheaded by the truly indefatigable @emderrick.bsky.social in which we search for selective sweeps in nature and genetic targets of selection within a species in the context of a diverse background community @isme-microbes.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/isme... 🧵 1/n

Super cool to finally see this out. Check out Anna's preprint for a PAO1 isolation host stripped of defence systems and prophage 👇🏻 Congrats all! 🥳

Anna Olina@annaolina.bsky.social · 3w ago

Excited to share this part of my research as a part of @multidefence.bsky.social: meet viPAO1 - the very best Pseudomonas strain for phage research😉 Also check out our temperate phage collection featuring PAnicatthedisco, PAthetic and some other new fun names🎉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I love typos now because it's a little sign AI didn't write it.

Are you looking for a postdoc exploring the cell biology of development, defining how cells change shape and move? Do you want to develop a research program & teaching skills preparing you for a position at a college or small University? Our new NIH grant will support those goals 1/n Please share

Wonderful profile of our new colleague in the Dept. of Biology in Maryland, @couchmicroscopy.bsky.social with secrets yet to be uncovered into a major evolutionary transition hanging out in murky waters. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/s...

In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life (Gift Article)

A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.

nytimes.com