Kyle MacLea 🦠

Two independent super-elegant studies from Maxwell & Laub labs find immune proteins that sense infection by binding to oligomeric phage protein rings (i.e phage portal), using them as a scaffold to assemble into their active immune effector form 🤯

Highly recommend read! 🤓📖l

Had not heard that Duesberg had passed. One of the century's mass murderers.

A family of archaeal hibernation factors that bind in tandem and protect ribosomes in dormant cells Under nutrient limitation or stress, ribosome hibernation factors inactivate and protect ribosomes. Although ribosome hibernation plays an important role in microbes, we lack a complete understanding of this process in archaea. Here, we identify a family of hibernation factors, which we designate as single ribosomal subunit inhibitors (SriA- SriD), from the methanogenic archaeon Methanosarcina acetivorans . All four sri genes are encoded in an operon and each Sri protein inhibits protein synthesis in vitro . Deletion of sri genes in M. acetivorans impaired growth recovery after prolonged stationary phase and also led to depletion of the small ribosomal subunit. Cryo-EM structures show that Sri proteins bind to the ribosome in tandem and form conserved protein-protein interfaces. Sri is broadly distributed across archaeal phyla and sri genes frequently co-occur. Together, these findings establish Sri proteins as a distinct group of hibernation factors that protect ribosomes during dormancy and expand our understanding of ribosome hibernation in archaea. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. U.S. National Science Foundation, https://ror.org/021nxhr62, CHE-2002182 National Institutes of Health, https://ror.org/01cwqze88, 5T32GM132022 Life Sciences Research Foundation, https://ror.org/0195dxj21 Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, https://ror.org/05avmtm72 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, https://ror.org/052csg198 Simons Foundation, https://ror.org/01cmst727 David and Lucile Packard Foundation, https://ror.org/032atxq54 Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco

A family of archaeal hibernation factors that bind in tandem and protect ribosomes in dormant cells | bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.19.700200v1?rss=1

I bet he really knows where his towel is!

So happy to announce our new preprint, “A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes.” We cultured a novel amoeba from Lassen Volcanic NP (CA, USA) that divides at 63°C (145°F) 🔥 - a new record for euk growth!
#protistsonsky 🧵

“The Trump administration is burning down our country’s most important public health agencies from the inside and pushing out anyone who dares to pull the fire alarm. Standing up for science is not a fireable offense and it should be seriously troubling to everyone who wants America to remain the world leader in biomedical research that this administration is not only running the NIH into the ground, but punishing anyone who has the courage to speak up about their concerns. When Director Bhattacharya testified before Congress in June, I made clear that not one employee who signed the Bethesda Declaration should face retaliation—yet that’s exactly what appears to be happening this week.

@standupforscience.bsky.social

#StandWithJenna

2/2

Dismantling the Institutional Review Board (IRB), that oversees all human subjects research, is bad. Really bad.

New student loan limits could change who gets to become a professor, doctor or lawyer Tighter federal borrowing limits may deepen inequities, especially for students from underrepresented backgrounds.

New student loan limits could change who gets to become a professor, doctor or lawyer

“Private equity billionaire Marc Rowan was revealed last week to be the driving force behind a Trump administration campaign pressuring nine major U.S. universities. Apollo Global Management, which Rowan co-founded in 1990, own[s] the for-profit University of Phoenix.”

@markowenmartin.bsky.social

Polysaccharide-degrading archaea dominate acidic hot springs: genomic and cultivation insights into a novel Thermoproteota lineage
Candidatus Marsarchaeota is now isolated and renamed as Tardisphaerales (phylum Thermoproteota) 🤓
@asm.org
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Is there an Omaha of the Rockies or something? :) That circle for Omaha (if Nebraska) seems way far west, unless it’s not to scale.

~40% of Hepatitis B infections are caught in childhood. It is contagious enough that it can be spread just from sharing common household objects.

The chance of chronic infection (ie does not clear, and is associated with high rates of liver failure and cancer) ranges from 50%-90% in this age group.

Tiny Tubes Reveal Clues to the Evolution of Complex Life | Quanta Magazine Scientists have identified tubulin structures in primitive Asgard archea that may have been the precursor of our own cellular skeletons.

Lokiarchaea are tricky to work with in the lab: they grow very slowly, exclusively in an oxygen free environment with the presence of symbiotic bacteria. But with careful nurturing, scientists hope to witness their cell division at work.

Sometimes I find myself in some kind of teaching fugue State where the metaphors and analogies come fast and furious too! Sometimes I feel like I could never really capture all of those a second time!

Preprint out for myloasm, our new nanopore / HiFi metagenome assembler!

Nanopore's getting accurate, but

1. Can this lead to better metagenome assemblies?
2. How, algorithmically, to leverage them?

with co-author Max Marin @mgmarin.bsky.social, supervised by Heng Li @lh3lh3.bsky.social

1 / N

Net rate of lateral gene transfer in marine prokaryoplankton Abstract. Lateral gene transfer is a major evolutionary process in Bacteria and Archaea. Despite its importance, lateral gene transfer quantification in na

Extraordinary paper. I LOVE this sentence:

“This translates to a net lateral gene transfer rate of ~250 genes L−1 seawater day−1 and involves both “flexible” and “core” genes. “

Must read in detail, but these numbers are amazing. academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

I gave a symposium talk at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 2025 (#eseb2025) meeting last week and this was my title slide showcasing how I was speaking as an independent scientist because @dalhousieu.bsky.social @dalhousie.bsky.social has locked us out.

Yeah almost no one!

Saddened to learn of the passing of Moselio "Elio" Schaechter—Distinguished Professor at Tufts, SDSU and UCSD—humanist and visionary leader in the fields of microbiology and scientific communication—mentor, friend, and inspiration to me and so many others

Small Things Considered
Big Things Achieved

🧪 Update: NSF will *appeal* an earlier court order that blocked 15% indirect rates.

I'm mostly surprised it took this long for them to file an appeal. So the fight continues. See: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Article from June as context: www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

Do you love alpine plants, ancient DNA, and/or population genetics? My lab will be hiring a postdoc soon to be based at the University of Maine! We’re looking for someone who uses genetic tools and thinks like a community ecologist. Happy to chat at #ESA2025 if you’re interested.

Latest paper elifesciences.org/articles/107... closes an important cycle in our efforts to study regeneration: week-long recordings allow us to observe the behaviour of cells during the entire course of regeneration in a crustacean leg – bright objects in movie are fluorescent nuclei of cells. 1/6

W
T
A
F

This country is a joke. A very, very terrible joke.

History of the English Language was fascinating. Intro to Linguistics too!

The Cells That Breathe Two Ways | Quanta Magazine In a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, a microbe does something that life shouldn’t be able to do: It breathes oxygen and sulfur at the same time.

Bacteria from a Yellowstone hot spring do something no other organism has been found to do: breathe oxygen and sulfur at the same time. 🧪 It's both aerobic and anaerobic, a beautiful freaky creature from a beautiful freaky place

🦠🧍‍♀️From bacterial to human immunity.

We report in @science.org the discovery of a human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins that participates in the TLR pathway of animal innate immunity.
Co-led wt @enzopoirier.bsky.social by D. Bonhomme and @hugovaysset.bsky.social

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

it's never been about antisemitism

Once as postdoc/lab manager I asked the PI for help with setting the large floor centrifuge that I hadn’t used before. He set the rotor wrong and sheared off the pins, and centrifuge was out of commission for months. VERY glad it wasn’t me! 😅

Very cool! One of my last pups was very picky as he got older and this would have been helpful I think!