The Leading Edge Fellows gathered this week to celebrate Zara Weinberg, a beloved member of our community. Our 7th cohort of Leading Edge Fellows (2026) will be named in her honor. The Zara Weinberg Leading Edge Cohort application is now open! Due Feb 2. www.leadingedgesymposium.org/apply/

Words cannot describe how excited I am to share the findings from the second half of my postdoc in @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social's lab where we discover that bacteria use functional amyloids to defend themselves from predatory bacteria. rdcu.be/euu5Y. See thread for details on this epic adventure 1/.

Functional amyloid proteins confer defence against predatory bacteria

Nature - Escherichia coli uses curli fibres, oligomers of the functional amyloid CsgA, as a barrier to protect against the predatory bacteria Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus and Myxococcus xanthus in a...

rdcu.be

Extremely excited to share I have accepted an offer to be an Assistant Professor in the MCDB department at the University of Michigan! Go Blue! The Ledvina lab will investigate the molecular interworking of the bacterial immune systems including defense against both viral and bacterial pathogens.

1/10 New pre-print(s) from the Sternberg Lab in collaboration with Leifu Chang's Lab! We uncover the unprecedented molecular mechanism of CRISPR-Cas12f-like proteins, which drive RNA-guided transcription independently of canonical promoter motifs. Full story here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Check out our new story led by @aesully98.bsky.social describing how bacteria turn immune evasion against phage! In collaboration with @benmorehouse.bsky.social lab, we discover that bacteria guard their nucleotide second messenger pool using a nucleotidyltransferase related to Cas10/CRISPR enzymes

Ashley Sullivan@aesully98.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited to share that my work from the @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social lab is now on bioRxiv! With @benmorehouse.bsky.social, we discovered that the Panoptes defense system—named after the all-seeing watchman of Hera—uses decoy nucleotides to detect phage anti-defense proteins.

Stop your scrolling and read this AMAZING story from my coworker @aesully98.bsky.social in @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social's lab in collaboration with @benmorehouse.bsky.social ! An immune system which detects anti-immune mechanisms, incredible!!

Ashley Sullivan@aesully98.bsky.social · last yr.

Excited to share that my work from the @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social lab is now on bioRxiv! With @benmorehouse.bsky.social, we discovered that the Panoptes defense system—named after the all-seeing watchman of Hera—uses decoy nucleotides to detect phage anti-defense proteins.

Our paper out @CellCellPress: Structure guided discovery of viral proteins that inhibit host immunity Congrats Erez Yirmiya, Azita Leavitt, Gil Amitai, our collaborators at the Kranzusch lab, and coauthors A 🧵 1/10 www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Structure-guided discovery of viral proteins that inhibit host immunity

Large-scale, structure-guided computational pipeline sifts through millions of phage proteins to identify those that bind and antagonize host immune proteins. Detected proteins are shown to inhibit no...

cell.com

Check out this incredible preprint from my coworker @emilykibby.bsky.social! Emily developed a computational pipeline to identify activators of phage defense pathways. Incredibly she found that a bacterial NLR-related protein senses multiple phage proteins 🤯 bacteria never stop surprising me!

Emily Kibby@emilykibby.bsky.social · 2y ago

I’m so excited to share that some of my grad work in the @aaronwhiteley lab is now available on bioRxiv! We used an AlphaFold-multimer screen to uncover how a bacterial NLR-related proteins senses multiple phage-encoded proteins to confer phage protection. Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The @jcchildsfund.bsky.social has been career changing for me! Such a fantastic organization. Check out their first ever Impact Report showing just how amazing they are 🤩

Jane Coffin Childs Fund for Medical Research@jcchildsfund.bsky.social · 2y ago

The Jane Coffin Childs Fund has compiled our first ever Impact Report. Full report: jccfund.org/about-fund/i... 1/

Exciting times! Our latest preprint is now live 🤩! After nearly 16 yrs of running my lab, I truly believe this is one of the most significant contributions we've made. It offers fresh hypotheses about how pandemic Vibrio cholerae spreads globally. Let’s dive in!🧵..1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Diverse phage defence systems define West African South American pandemic Vibrio cholerae

Our understanding of the factors underlying the evolutionary success of different lineages of pandemic Vibrio cholerae remains incomplete. Interestingly, two unique genetic signatures define the West ...

biorxiv.org

If you want to follow awesome women and non-binary early career scientists, the starter pack of Leading Edge Fellows is here! go.bsky.app/He3EAcq

It’s here! Thrilled to be sharing a review article I wrote with @aaronwhiteley.bsky.social exploring the similarities and conservation of immune systems across life rdcu.be/dzSa3