The Rawls Lab is hiring! We are seeking a motivated research technician to support cutting-edge studies in gastrointestinal physiology using zebrafish & mice. To learn more about this hands-on & in-person position at Duke University in Durham NC, click here: careers.duke.edu/job/Durham-R...

New paper in collaboration with @proftracypalmer.bsky.social, @lislowe.bsky.social and many more. We show that mycobacteria produce Type VII secreted anti-bacterial protein toxins. Excited to explore this new area of mycobacterial biology. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Check out our latest T7SS toxin story. These reverse toxins aren’t as rare as we thought!

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A novel reverse lipase toxin substrate of the Staphylococcus aureus type VII secretion system https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.22.733114v1

It's Not Rewarding for Mitochondria: Dopamine-Induced Mitochondrial Dysfunction Activates cGAS-STING to Drive IL-6 Secretion in Macrophages https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.23.719926v1

Discovery of gene functions in #Mycobacterium #tuberculosis has been slow. This study tests a genome-wide barcoded #transposon library across 95 environmental conditions, providing a rich resource of new gene functions, including metabolic & resistance pathways @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4vG0mz1

The LMB is proud to launch the Career Returner Fellowship, a three-year, fully funded postdoc placement for scientists who have had a career break of over 1 year. Applications are open now! More details: mrclmb.ac.uk/careers-and-... Please share this post with anyone who may be interested!

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...

The Mycobacterium abscessus cytochrome bcc:aa3 oxidase structure paves the way for an agent targeting subunit QcrB pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41932870/ #cryoEM

Out Now! Specialized RNA decay fine-tunes monogenic antigen expression in Trypanosoma brucei #MicroSky

Specialized RNA decay fine-tunes monogenic antigen expression in Trypanosoma brucei

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 30 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02289-4To evade the immune system, Trypanosoma brucei relies on a specialized ‘expression site body’. Protein condensates within this nuclear compartment modulate expression of virulence genes via a targeted RNA decay mechanism.

go.nature.com

Latest for @nejm.org, an attempt to bring much-needed attention to these challenging ID cases that for some reason receive so little attention -- NTM. #IDSky Nontuberculous Mycobacteria: The Common Infections You’ve Possibly Never Heard Of | NEJM Voices voices.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Nontuberculous Mycobacteria: The Common Infections You’ve Possibly Never Heard Of

Twenty facts about a surprisingly common group of infections.

voices.nejm.org

Coupling fatty acid β-oxidation with the respiratory chain in mycobacteria: @courbongautier.bsky.social , @johnrubinstein.bsky.social et al reveal the unusual structure of the electron-shuttling protein EtfD and an assay to study its pharmaceutical targeting link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Structural basis for EtfD-mediated coupling of β-oxidation and the respiratory chain in mycobacteria - The EMBO Journal

Targeting β-oxidation has been proposed as a strategy for shortening tuberculosis (TB) treatment by killing non-replicating Mycobacterium tuberculosis within granulomas where the pathogen relies on ho...

link.springer.com

Angelika Amon was an inspiration, and I’m deeply grateful for my time in her lab. Please encourage PhD students outside the US who embody her excellence in research & infectious passion for biology to apply. ki.mit.edu/events/prize...

Myself and @immunoah.bsky.social are looking to hire a postdoctoral scientist to build a next-generation high-throughput high-resolution light sheet microscope for imaging entire cleared organs/tissues and to further develop live & fixed tissue clearing methods. www.nature.com/naturecareer...

MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology@mrclmb.ac.uk · 5mo ago

Interested in instrument development & optical microscopy? Join @immunoah.bsky.social & @jamesdmanton.bsky.social developing high-throughput light sheet microscopy to image entire tissues & progressing tissue clearing methods www.nature.com/naturecareer... Closes 07 APR #PostdocJobs #neuroimmunology

This feels like a helpful primer for understanding AI in general. It makes programmers more efficient on the front end because they can generate more code. But it makes them less efficient afterwards because it vastly increases the amount of time they spend tweaking and fixing bugs.

Why developers using AI are working longer hours

Studies find AI helps developers release more software—while logging longer hours and fixing problems after the code goes live

scientificamerican.com

Congrats Brendan, Clif, David, and team! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Discovery and development of a new oxazolidinone with reduced toxicity for the treatment of tuberculosis - Nature Medicine

MK-7762 is a new oxazolidinone antitubercular agent that is structurally similar to linezolid, and demonstrated in vivo efficacy, lesion penetration and limited toxicity compared to linezolid, indicat...

nature.com

1/📢 In our new publication, we estimate that in 2022, 134 million people worldwide had a recent Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection and were at high risk of progressing to TB disease. Read the full paper in PLOS Medicine (tinyurl.com/mtbinfection). #TBSky

Estimating the global burden of viable Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection: A mathematical modelling study

Alvaro Schwalb and colleagues conducted a mathematical modelling study to estimate the global burden of viable Mycobacterium tuberculosis--that which can cause disease and be transmitted--to help guid...

tinyurl.com

Still 2 weeks left to apply for this position.

Kate Beckham@kshbeckham.bsky.social · 7mo ago

BBSSRC (NEEDL) funded PhD studentship in my lab co-supervised by @thecopperdoctor.bsky.social and @mycobacterium-ncl.bsky.social If you're interested in structural biology and membrane transport processes, check out www.findaphd.com/phds/project... deadline 27th of Feb! Get in touch for more info

Such a fun collaboration with @mel-foulon.bsky.social from the TS lab 🤝-👀 We combined dual RNA-Seq 🧬 and advanced imaging 🔬 to uncover how intracellular compartmentalization drives niche-specific metabolic phenotypes in mycobacteria!! Fantastic team effort ✨ #Tbsky #microsky

Mélanie Foulon@mel-foulon.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🚨 New preprint! Together with @carobarisch.bsky.social lab, we investigated how intracellular compartmentalization shapes lipid acquisition in mycobacteria Interestingly, deleting one FACL enzyme (FACL6) revealed striking compartment-dependent phenotypes 🔬 Check it out: doi.org/10.64898/202...

pH-responsive substrate switching in mycobacterial Type VII ESX secretion. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.04.703728v1

#Microbiology The anti-tuberculosis drug bedaquiline targets the mycobacterial ATP synthase, but how that leads to bacterial death is unclear Here the authors clarify how bedaquiline works @jnblab.bsky.social @morwan.me #TBSky #antibiotics #AMR http://dlvr.it/TQjZ0W

How can we tell whether an antibiotic eradicates an infection? Researchers from the @biomedizin.unibas.ch, at the @unibas.ch, present an antimicrobial single-cell microscopy-based method that measures antibiotic lethality in individual bacteria. 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s415... @natmicrobiol.nature.com

Happy to share a new preprint exploring the unusual biochemistry of a "weirdly" diverged cytochrome c in malaria parasites that exemplifies a lineage common to many apicomplexan parasites. @uofubiochem.bsky.social @uuhsresearch.bsky.social @uofutahcihd.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A Divergent Cytochrome c in Malaria Parasites with an Anomalously Low Redox Potential

Eukaryotic cytochrome (cyt) c is a highly conserved mitochondrial protein central to cellular respiration, featuring a covalently attached hexacoordinate heme whose redox potential is tuned by axial H...

biorxiv.org

did it in four words hemmingway

I can’t believe a technical solution to a complex social problem didn’t work. Ah well, nevertheless

@gquaggiotto.bsky.social · 8mo ago

One Laptop Per Child, 10 years later: "we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression... computer access significantly improved students’ computer skills but not their cognitive skills" www.nber.org/papers/w34495

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is an outlier in many ways. One of them is keeping a high degree of functional redundancy despite its obligate pathogen lifestyle. In this review, we reflect on the biological meaning of M. tuberculosis functional redundancies. journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

Essential redundancies fuel Mycobacterium tuberculosis adaptation to the host

Redundancy in biology is, at a glance, counterintuitive because if the function of two gene products completely overlaps then, throughout the course of evolution, one of the genes will likely accumula...

journals.plos.org

1/ A year ago, a 71-year-old Louisiana man died from H5N1, marking the first avian flu death in the US. Now we report in @jem.org that the cause of his death is rogue autoantibodies neutralizing type I IFN (AutoAb-IFN). doi.org/10.1084/jem....

Hey friends. I’m looking for a postdoc interested in studying host-pathogen interactions and immunology of tuberculosis. Send me some good people! We have a great group here! Email me joanne@pitt.edu. Thanks!

If you or someone you know is looking for a post-doctoral position working on mycobacterial envelope biology, please get in touch. I am recruiting here at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.

Now properly published at @natcomms.nature.com with few additional experiments incl. demonstration of Daptomycin's ability to depolarise non-growing cells. See the original preprint-thread for a summary of our findings. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #microsky

The last resort antibiotic daptomycin exhibits two independent antibacterial mechanisms of action - Nature Communications

The precise mechanism of action of the antibiotic daptomycin is controversial. Here, Buttress et al. provide evidence for two independent antibacterial mechanisms: membrane depolarisation and inhibiti...

nature.com

Dr Jess Buttress@jbuttresssci.bsky.social · 2y ago

So happy our pre-print on daptomycin mechanism of action is now out! Here, we present three main findings: i) daptomycin does not form large membrane pores in either B. subtilis or S. aureus, (1/3)

Are you looking for female speakers in CryoEM for seminars and conferences? Are you a woman in CryoEM and not yet on the ‚woman in CryoEM‘ list? Find your speakers and add/update name and affiliation! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...