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 · 2w 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 · 2w 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 · 2w 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 · last mo.

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!

Folddisco is now published @natbiotech.nature.com. It’s a fast motif search for similar 3D DISCOntinuous residues like catalytic sites or zinc fingers across the entire protein universe. 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💾 folddisco.foldseek.com​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 🌐 https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco

Structural motif search across the protein universe with Folddisco - Nature Biotechnology

Folddisco enables protein structural motif search in million scale databases.

nature.com

Martin Steinegger 🇺🇦@martinsteinegger.bsky.social · last yr.

Folddisco finds similar (dis)continuous 3D motifs in large protein structure databases. Its efficient index enables fast uncharacterized active site annotation, protein conformational state analysis and PPI interface comparison. 1/9🧶🧬 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/folddisco

@romihadary.bsky.social and @soreklab.bsky.social 's discovery that sponge proteins constitute enormous families of viral immune evasion factors is now out in @natmicrobiol.nature.com @reneechang.bsky.social and our lab were happy to help with this story! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Functional diversity of phage sponge proteins that sequester host immune signals - Nature Microbiology

A functional screen reveals phage sponge proteins that bind Pycsar, Thoeris and CBASS signalling molecules to inhibit bacterial immunity.

nature.com

Kranzusch Lab@kranzuschlab.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Two major breakthroughs for the nucleotide immune signaling field in pre-print by @romihadary.bsky.social @soreklab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1) Beautiful bioinformatic analyses reveal known viral nucleotide sponges are members of enormous protein families ubiquitous in phages

Phage-encoded single-guide RNAs subvert CRISPR-Cas9 immunity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.01.729453v1

New preprint! 🚨 Phage proteins don't act alone. Phages rely on homooligomerisation to assemble identical protein subunits into functional forms. But figuring out those exact configurations experimentally is tough. Learn about our approach in our new preprint! 👇 (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A newly released AI tool has generated an atlas of more than one billion predicted protein structures and billions more protein sequences. go.nature.com/4wS3Pen

Move over, AlphaFold: open source model predicts shape of 1 billion proteins

The new open-source atlas, generated by an AI tool called ESMFold2, vastly increases the known protein universe.

go.nature.com

How do sperm and egg fuse? Surprisingly, we still don’t fully know… Our field has uncovered many pieces of the fertilization puzzle, but not how they fit together. We identify ✨ SPARK ✨ - a conserved sperm complex that couples sperm-egg binding to fusion. tinyurl.com/34cm4xat Read on! 🧵👇

Malnak, @bushmanlab.bsky.social et al. demonstrate how structural information can be used to overcome the limits of sequence-based methods and uncover fundamental principles of viral diversity and evolution. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag110 #evobio #molbio #virus

Uncovering viral protein acquisition events and human-specific folds with pairwise comparisons of predicted protein structures

Abstract. Pairwise sequence comparisons are at the center of molecular evolutionary analyses. However, viral pairwise comparisons are challenging because e

doi.org

🍻 Science belongs everywhere – even in the pub! Pint of Science is a science festival bringing researchers into the pubs next door: Tonight, Perutz PI Tom Leonard connected Max Perutz, Artemis II, and kinase research in his talk, while AITHYRA PI Jason Nomburg shared his fascination for viruses 🦠

With Eugene Koonin, we wrote a rather comprehensive review on the origin, evolution and organization of the #virosphere. We describe all 10 viral realms and the logic behind them, and so much more. Check it out! comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/biologies/ar...

TIR-like NADases act in bacterial immunity and the RNA vault https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.01.722283v1

Bacterial immune proteins have repeatedly evolved to become parts of eukaryotic immunity. But how? Our new preprint uncovers a recent horizontal transfer event & shows how eukaryotes co-opted a toxic bacterial immune protein 🦠🧪🧵 1/

Can we use #proteindesign to develop countermeasures before viruses cause pandemics? We describe the computational design of an ultrapotent and broadly neutralizing deltacoronavirus miniprotein in our latest work led by Nathan Avery @hhmi-science.bsky.social 1/12 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...