Igor Iatsenko

Two fully funded #PhD positions on insect #Symbiosis available in our lab: Spiroplasma in Neotropical Arthropods (tinyurl.com/spiroplasma) & Psyllid symbionts (tinyurl.com/psyllids).
Please contact me for any questions & share widely #symbiosky #academicjobs

Infection and Immunity is now welcoming nominations for highly promising scientists at the assistant professor level (or equivalent) to submit research to the next New Voices in Microbiology Collection!

Please nominate by the August 18 deadline using the below link:
app.asm.org/account/logi...

Majority of fruit fly immunity studies can be replicated, huge analysis finds Verification of 50 years of data bolsters immunology research, but identifies “suspicious” papers that don’t hold up

Comment on our @Reproducibility project in @Drosophila immunity. It is a normal that findings—however exciting and important at the time—may later prove to be more complex than initially believed. Re-evaluations is essential to the self-correcting nature of science. www.science.org/content/arti...

Liver FGF21 mediates sex-specific adaptation to juvenile protein malnutrition Dietary protein sufficiency during childhood is essential for healthy growth and tissue development. Chronic protein deficiency leads to stunting, height-for-age more than two standard deviations belo...

📢 New preprint:
“Liver FGF21 mediates sex-specific adaptation to juvenile protein malnutrition”
Led by @ameliejoly.bsky.social, co-supervised with @francoisleulier.bsky.social.
We’re proud to share this story.
👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

ERC to introduce seven-year €7 million ‘super grants’ in 2026 The European Research Council (ERC) is set to launch its first seven-year €7 million super grant call in May next year.The grants, called ERC+, will be open to researchers at all career stages and in ...

See? There's money! What would be great, instead, is to increase the budget for the existing schemes, though 🧪

Thanks! Will check.

Any recommendations for a #Drosophila transgenesis facility in Europe?

During their trip to Ukraine, Ferenc Krausz and Serge Haroche visited universities, research institutions and destroyed buildings - and met people who, despite the war, are shaping everyday life and believe in the future.

In early March, the Nobel Laureates Ferenc Krausz and Serge Haroche returned from their visit to #Ukraine with strong and lasting impressions. With their documentary, the two researchers draw attention to the dramatic circumstances 📹 peace4europa.org

Infection-Induced Elevation of Gut Glycosaminoglycans Fosters Microbiota Expansion in Drosophila melanogaster https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.24.661374v1

Proud of this work led by a former PhD student @aranzazuarias.bsky.social. Here, we investigated how the host controls the abundance of gut commensals and how some of them can benefit from infection.
#infection #symbiosky #proudPI
#immunity #AcademicSky #insect #symbiosis #Drosophila

New tenure track assistant professor position in molecular microbiology in our department @dmf-unil.bsky.social @unil.bsky.social! We are casting a wide net for an experimental molecular microbiologist. Apply here: wwwfbm.unil.ch/releve/appli...

Temperate Bacteriophage Populations in the Human Gut: Culturomics and Experimental Insights Jeremy J. Barr june 12 4 PM SEMINAR ROOM 1+2 MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR INFECTION BIOLOGY, BERLIN

📢 Voices in Infection Biology
Join us next this Thursday for a talk with @jeremyjbarr.bsky.social from @monashuniversity.bsky.social, kindly hosted by @iatsenkolab.bsky.social.

🗓️ Thursday, June 12
🕓 4 pm
📍 on-site seminar (Berlin)

Info and abstract: www.mpiib-berlin.mpg.de/events/42144...

Yes, this is an important point that we did not cover very deeply. However, the fact that we still see the differences in germ- free flies suggests that microbiota alone can't explain the phenotype. It is very curios that male microbiome is more responsive to perturbations.

Sex Differences in Drosophila Intestinal Metabolism Contribute to Sexually Dimorphic Infection Outcome and Alter Gut Pathogen Virulence Sexual dimorphism in infection outcomes is a pervasive phenomenon, the underlying mechanisms of which remain incompletely understood. Here, utilizing Pseudomonas entomophila intestinal infection in Dr...

Happy to share our new preprint! We explored the mechanisms underlying differences between male and female #Drosophila in susceptibility to intestinal #infection. #symbiosky
#immunity #AcademicSky #insect #symbiosis

Join us in Tubingen as a Junior Research Group Leader if you do research on #ESKAPE pathogens and infections and are interested in the highly cooperative environment of @dzif.bsky.social‬ and @cmfi.bsky.social ! Please send your application or forward to colleagues!
uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet...

While I applaud Europe taking a step to fund bringing scientific excellence to Europe, the ERC’s current success rates at 10% for Europe based scientists is statistically at lottery levels. The total ERC budget should double across the board aiming at doubling funding rates.

Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of Edinburgh Apply now for the Postdoctoral Research Associate role on jobs.ac.uk - the leading job board for higher education jobs. View details.

Hi #Drosophila folk: I'm advertising a 2-year #Postdoc, funded by a BBSRC grant on the genetic and immune determinants and evolutionary constraints underlying extreme pathogen transmission phenotypes. Deadline 29 April, details in the link below, or feel free to email:
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMQ231/p...

Drosophila symbionts in infection: when a friend becomes an enemy | Infection and Immunity Occupying the interface between host and environment, host-associated microbes play essential roles in interactions with pathogens and influence disease progression (1–4). Considering that most entry ...

Happy to share our latest minireview on
Drosophila symbionts in infection: when a friend becomes an enemy | Infection and Immunity journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
#immunity #infection #antimicrobialpeptides #microbiome #Drosophila #AcademicSky #insect #endosymbiont #symbiosis

Layers of immunity: Deconstructing the Drosophila effector response The host innate immune response relies on the cooperation of multiple defense modules. In insects and other arthropods, which have only innate immune mechanisms, four main immune-specific modules cont...

Excited to finally announce this work which has been in the pipeline for 5 years: Layers of Immunity.

Faustine et al. made a set of immune mutants covering 4 major immune modules in #Drosophila, deleting melanization (ROS), phagocytosis, and both Toll & Imd NF-kB responses. What did we find?

1/n 🧵

PhD student / doctoral candidate in Infection Biology AUREUS is a multidisciplinary European Training Network built to counteract multidrug resistant Staphylococcus aures infections, funded by Marie Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN).

You have a strong background in molecular microbiology and look for a PhD position? Join us in #Tubingen in an international, enthusiastic team team, in an excellent research environment of the EU-funded #AUREUS program
euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/328844
@cmfi.bsky.social

Characterization and host range prediction of Staphylococcus aureus phages through receptor-binding protein analysis Bacteriophages are crucial in bacterial communities and can be used for therapy of multidrug-resistant pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus. Howeve…

Matching phages to cognate host bacteria has remained merely empirical. We describe a new tool predicting the host range of #S.aureus-specific phages, based on phage receptor binding protein sequences, which will become helpful for #phage-therapy.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

And enjoyed it even more when highlighting it in Cell Host Microbe
Free access link here:
authors.elsevier.com/a/1kbY9_hwRX...

Enjoyed a lot reading this masterpiece from Will Ludington's lab: A conserved bacterial genetic basis for commensal-host specificity | Science www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Host-Microbe Symbioses- Our favorite summer school is back! Help us spread the word!

Join our lively interactive community of evolutionary biologists in Northern Germany! 7 PhD positions on TransEvo topics, incl 1 PhD position in the Schulenburg lab. @transevo.bsky.social

Workshop on ecological & evolutionary immunology/insect immunity. 15-19th Sept 2025 - Werbellinsee, Germany, organised by Sophie Armitage and Jens Rolff. Abstract deadline start of March www.bcp.fu-berlin.de/en/biologie/...

Congratulations to 🌟Alexandra Hrdina🌟 and 🌟Harshita Mishra🌟 from @iatsenkolab.bsky.social & Olivia Majer’s lab @mpiib-berlin.mpg.de for receiving the Anna Wessels Williams Award. Congratulations 🍾🍾🍾

Congrats Alexandra Hrdina and Harshita Mishra on a well-deserved award! Well done! Another proud PI moment.

Open Positions -

We are recruiting one postdoc and one PhD student to join our lab on #Drosophila #innate immunity in Lausanne (Switzerland). More info: www.epfl.ch/labs/lemaitr...

Congratulations Dr. Arias-Rojas @aranzazu.bsky.social!
The first PhD student of the lab successfully defended the thesis today. Proud PI moment and an important milestone for the whole lab. It was very rewarding to be part of your PhD journey!