Charles Coluzzi

Check out our latest preprint from @jnvmartinson.bsky.social and @leosong.bsky.social! 🌟🦠

We found that conjugative plasmids can actively eliminate recipient bacteria that resist plasmid acquisition. 🧵

Plasmids weaponize conjugation to eliminate non-permissive recipients https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.10.705089v1

Accurate plasmid reconstruction from metagenomics data using assembly–alignment graphs and contrastive learning - Nature Biotechnology PlasMAAG uses cross-sample information to improve plasmid reconstruction from metagenomic samples.

Accurate plasmid reconstruction from metagenomics data using assembly–alignment graphs and contrastive learning www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

Wikipedia is needed now more than ever, 25 years on The online encyclopedia is an antidote to an increasingly poisoned information ecosystem. Researchers should help to nourish it.

I couldn’t agree more! Help support Wikipedia.
It has been a pillar of high-quality knowledge sharing since the early web, and it’s more relevant than ever in the fuzzy age of AI
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Un poste de Maître de Conférence est ouvert pour rejoindre notre unité à Lyon !

Possibilité de rejoindre mon équipe pour travailler sur:
- caractérisation des mécanismes de défense anti-phage
- transfert horizontal et interactions entre éléments génétiques mobiles

N'hésitez pas à me contacter

Postdoctoral position - Synthetic Biology / Bacterial Immunity - Research The Bikard lab at Institut Pasteur in Paris is seeking to hire postdoctoral researchers. We are investigating bacteria / bacteriophages interactions, and the genetic innovation that happens at this in...

🚨 Hiring Alert! 🚨My lab at Institut Pasteur is recruiting several Postdocs! We have exciting open projects in: 🦠 Synthetic Biology and🛡️ Bacterial Immunity. Come do great science with us in the middle of Paris! 🇫🇷🥐 research.pasteur.fr/en/job/postd...

🚨L'ENS de Lyon recrute un.e maître de conférence qui rejoindra le CIRI pour développer ses recherches sur l'immunité bactérienne, les transferts horizontaux et les MGE.

📖 Une très belle opportunité d'enseigner à des étudiants brillants tout en menant des recherches excitantes !

Here, we find that many Genomic islands have origins of transfer (oriT) mobilisable by conjugation, incl. known Pathogenicity & defense islands. iOriT use only an oriT for transfer by hitching on conjugative elements: they make abundant, diverse, ancient families of mobile genetic elements. See🧵

Bacteria chromosomes contain Genomic Islands that provide virulence, antibiotic resistance, MGE-defence,... They transfer between cells, but the mechanism of most remains elusive.

Here we explore the conjugative capacity of these mysterious Genomic Islands.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Convergence and global molecular epidemiology of Klebsiella pneumoniae plasmids harbouring the iuc3 virulence locus: a population genomic analysis Klebsiella pneumoniae is an important pathogen of humans and animals. In the past five years, increasing reports of convergent strains that carry both…

It has been a long road, but our paper on Klebsiella plasmids is finally out in Lancet Microbe. Thanks to all co authors but especially Marjorie Gibbon and Natacha Couto www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bacteriophages are normally classified as either virulent or temperate. Reality is, of course, more complicated!
Here we show many bacterial isolates contain non-temperate phages that can persist through restreaking.
Thanks to all co-authors for such a great collaboration!

MBE | Cost of Altered Translation Accuracy Shapes Adaptation to Antibiotics in E. coli Bacteria with varying levels of accuracy in protein synthesis (blue cells, using tRNAs to produce amino acid chains) face antibiotics (purple demons). Mistranslation exacts a fitness cost, and as errors increase (red amino acids), so does the cost (the red rubbish heap under each cell). Wild type, mistranslating and hyper-accurate cells also experience different ancestral fitness costs from antibiotic exposure. Strains adapt to antibiotics with varying success, using distinct mutations (represented by the nucleotide sequences). Image credit: Nishant Asawadekar

@laasya2.bsky.social @deepaagashe.bsky.social et al. quantified the growth cost of mistranslation rates and exposure to antibiotics in E. coli, finding that altered translation accuracy can shape adaptive outcomes.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf312

🖌️ Nishant Asawadekar

#evobio #molbio

Environment-dependent evolution drives divergent adaptive strategies and parasite dynamics in a minimal community Prophages, phage genomes integrated into bacterial chromosomes, are widespread, yet, the extent to which these resident parasites contribute to host fitness and shape evolutionary trajectories, partic...

Preprint alert📢! 
Ever wondered how much bacterial parasites influence evolutionary outcomes of their host?
➡️ We co-evolved two bacterial strains in conditions in which the costs and benefits of prophage carriage varied

Here is what we found. 
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#MicroSky #PhageSky
🧵

Plasmid streamlining drives the extinction of antibiotic resistance plasmids under selection for horizontal transmission Conjugative plasmids play an important role in the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes among pathogenic bacteria. This study shows that AMR loss in evolving populations is associated with t...

Our story on plasmid streamlining is now published in PLoS Biology! With @andrewmatthews.bsky.social and @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social
#MicroSky #Mevosky
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

A legendary being holds a phylogenetic tree in the palm of their hand, with snowy mountains in the background.

The next LEGEND conference on machine learning for evolutionary genomics will be in Aussois (French Alps) between December 8th and 12th.

Mark your calendars and make sure your best work is ready next September when the call for abstracts opens 🙂

legend2025.sciencesconf.org

MRC DiMeN Doctoral Training Partnership: Resistant zombies: how drug-resistance plasmids manipulate the behaviour of the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa at University of Liverpool on Fin... PhD Project - MRC DiMeN Doctoral Training Partnership: Resistant zombies: how drug-resistance plasmids manipulate the behaviour of the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa at University of Li...

🚨#PhD studentship opportunity! Plasmids provide bacteria with antimicrobial resistance, but do they have more fundamental effects on behaviour? 🧫🦠💫🧟‍♂️

Apply for a 4y funded MRC DiMeN position with me and Jamie Wheeler @livuni-ives.bsky.social www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Please apply for this, and/or encourage your mentees and peers to do so!

Still looking for our perfect doctoral candidate as part of @evomg-dn.bsky.social - come and join us to work on the evolutionary pressures that shape gene expression and disease in the uterus!

Please RT (or is it RB? not sure how our lingo has changed!)

🥳 congratulations Zam !! Well deserved

High-throughput conjugation reveals strain specific recombination patterns enabling precise trait mapping in Escherichia coli Author summary Escherichia coli demonstrates a remarkable ability to adapt to diverse environments. This adaptability is in part connected to its ability to recombine incoming DNA in its chromosome, a...

#microsky 😮

journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

Join us tomorrow if you like plasmids and clones! @sandrareuter.bsky.social will be talking about a particular intriguing outbreak 🤓. @escmid.bsky.social

Jumbo phage–mediated transduction of genomic islands | PNAS Bacteria acquire new genes by horizontal gene transfer, typically mediated by mobile genetic elements (MGEs). While plasmids, bacteriophages, and c...

@prczhaoyansong.bsky.social’s deep dive into the dark matter of compost communities is now out 🎉 Genomic islands hijack jumbo phages—whose capsids enable transfer of large tracts of DNA—shedding new light on the scale & scope of phage-mediated gene flow 😎

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Napoleon's retreat from Moscow CREDIT Barbieri et al., Current Biology

DNA from Napoleon’s 1812 army identifies the pathogens likely responsible for the army’s demise during their Russian retreat. www.cell.com/current-biol...

Nicolás Rascovan & colleagues
@currentbiology.bsky.social

JOB OFFER #PhageSky

We have a postdoc position opening in my group to investigate phage-MGE interactions !

We're based in the very nice city of Lyon, France @mmsb-lyon.bsky.social

Contact me for more info !

>> Apply on the CNRS webpage emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

The assembly of a hybrid type IV secretion system by a Crohn’s disease-associated Escherichia coli strain - Nature Communications Adherent-invasive strains of E. coli are commonly isolated from patients with Crohn’s disease. Here, the authors show that an AIEC harbours a hybrid Type IV secretion system (T4SS) that mediates pilin...

New paper just out from #OurImperial @tcostalab.bsky.social

The assembly of a hybrid type IV secretion system by a Crohn’s disease-associated Escherichia coli strain.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

YouTube video by Milner Centre for Evolution How the Vectors of Antibiotic Resistance Have Evolved - Professor Zamin Iqbal

Podcast with me and @turiking.bsky.social for the @milnerevolution.bsky.social series, on plasmid evolution over the last 100 years, talking about our ( @cazares-adr.bsky.social , Nick Thomson, @sarah1alexander.bsky.social & co) recent paper www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
youtu.be/Mzr3TD4ijs0?...

"Comment l'IA révolutionne la biologie ?", une conférence grand public animée par Bastien Boussau dans le cadre de la Fête de la Science.

Inscription ici : tinyurl.com/3pe9wzcc

📆 Samedi 11 octobre, 15h00.
📍Campus de la Doua - arrêt Tram T1 et T4 "La Doua-Gaston Berger"

Isolation, engineering and ecology of temperate phages from the human gut - Nature Human host-associated cellular products may act as induction agents for bacteriophages.

Very excited to share the latest work from our lab, which was published today in Nature!
nature.com/articles/s41...

PhD graduate and now post-doc Sofia Dahlman, along with co-senior author Sam Forster from The Hudson and other researchers from our lab and others.

Global antibiotic resistance surveillance report 2025 This new WHO report presents a global analysis of antibiotic resistance prevalence and trends, drawing on more than 23 million bacteriologically confirmed cases of bloodstream infections, urinary trac...

Global antibiotic resistance surveillance report 2025
www.who.int/publications...

The time has come for you to listen to the next session of the ISPB Virtual Seminar Series. Tuesday, October 14th, from 07:00–08:00 UTC.
Two new speakers, two great new stories.
Do not miss them!
#ISPB #Plasmid #MGEs