Kyle MacLea 🦠

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!

Wow didn’t know this kind of stuff existed for dogs!

E.P.A. Says It Will Eliminate Its Scientific Research Arm

Terrible Friday news dump.The wealth of expertise. The decades of scientific progress. The emerging and urgent challenges we were focused on tackling. It is all so short-sided and cruel. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/c...

The spatiotemporal distribution of human pathogens in ancient Eurasia - Nature Screening shotgun-sequencing data from ancient humans covering 37,000 years of Eurasian history uncovers the widespread presence of ancient bacterial, viral and parasite DNA and zoonotic pathogens coi...

M⃣I⃣S⃣S⃣I⃣N⃣G⃣ L⃣I⃣N⃣K⃣S⃣

𝙉𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 paper by Sikora et al: metagenomic data from 1,313 ancient human remains over 37,000 years

Identified >3,000 instances of known human pathogens

Zoonotic pathogens begin to appear ~6,500 years ago coinciding with the rise of livestock domestication—major epidemiological shift

Thanks!

WTF? How did the faculty not get rather worked up about this change?

Would like to do it the RIGHT way! Nice job!