Beuzón & Ruiz-Albert Lab

Let's keep in touch: How membrane contact sites drive immune responses Inside every cell, a pulsating network of molecular messengers orchestrates life's most critical conversations. While vesicular trafficking facilitates lon

IN BRIEF: Let’s keep in touch: How membrane contact sites drive immune responses (Sonhita Chakraborty) doi.org/10.1093/plce... #PlantScience @aspbofficial

A poster with branding for the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre fo Virus Research, labelled 'Virus Snowflakes.' The poster shows snowflake-like virus designs and song lyrics reading: On the twelfth day of Christmas, a virus gave to me, Twelve fights worth winning, Eleven Christmas dinners, Ten lunar landers, Nine childhood vaccines, Eight tools for teaching, Seven dogs a-barking, Six wasps a-laying, FIIIIVE TIIINY RIIIIIIINGS, Four vaccine platforms, Three genome segments, Two twinned capsids, and A world that is too small to see

Feeling festive?
Why not deck the halls with @cvrinfo.bsky.social's papercraft #VirusSnowflakes and celebrate the science of viruses and the fight against viral diseases.
Download for free: cvr-engagement.co.uk/virus-snowfl...
#scicomm #sciart #decorations

ERC-Plus: jackpot science or missed chance to fix academia? My reflections on ERC-Plus, Europe’s newest ultra-competitive research grant and what it tells us about the academic culture we’re…

I just published: ERC-Plus: jackpot science or missed chance to fix academia?

My reflections on ERC-Plus, Europe’s newest ultra-competitive research grant and what it tells us about the academic culture we’re building.

medium.com/p/erc-plus-j...

A commensal bacterium secretes effector proteins to establish population heterogeneity in the gut Zagieboylo and colleagues demonstrate that the human commensal Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron secretes two self-targeting proteins that induce heterogeneity within its own population. Differential expre...

An unexpected mechanism for population heterogeneity in the gut microbiome:

www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

📋 Join us on Friday 5th for a fascinating seminar with the researcher Detlef Weigel (Max Planck Tübingen, Germany)

Don't miss it!
🕓 9:30 AM
📍 IHSM La Mayora Auditorium

More information here! ⬇️

Adding alt text to this because this is fucking amazing and everyone deserves to read it.

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Bimodal expression of Type 3 Secretion System 2 enables cooperative virulence among intracellular Salmonella Typhimurium
dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

Feeding your enemy's enemy: Acidifying bacteria inhibit pathogenic bacteria more strongly with increasing glucose Classical microbiology has focused on directly suppressing pathogens using drugs, ignoring other harmless microbial species living alongside the pathogens. We now have a much better understanding of h...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The GT goes to Stuttgart! A (brief) trip, nice scenery, good food, a touch of (mostly fictitious) science, and excellent company! What else could one wish for in a lab retreat? (Ah — it was also the 10th anniversary of the lab!) 🎂🌱🦠

Happy Anniversary!

Happy anniversary!

What an incredible 10 years! Here’s to another 10 and beyond! 🥳🎉👏🏻CONGRATULATIONS, @geminiteamlab.bsky.social 💚🦠🌱 #plantvirus #postdoclife #virology #labretreat

How do plants fight disease? 🌱 #NASmember Jane Parker studies NLR proteins that help plants sense attackers and launch powerful immune defenses. She shares her latest findings on how these proteins signal plants to resist disease in a new @pnas.org QnAs: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to bring to your attention 2-year work by @sylvain-vicente.bsky.social and collaborators #BIOSP #MathNum @inrae-dpt-spe.bsky.social. A re-evaluation of STAMP modelling, introducing a much needed time-resolution. Works also on Animal-bacterial infection models. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Secreting bacteria undergo drastic changes.
We found that in Yersinia, T3SS activation triggers rapid, large-scale reorganisation of chromosomal and plasmid DNA. This links secretion to growth inhibition-revealing a new connection between virulence and bacterial cell biology.
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

The scientific world would be a better place if reviews routinely reflected this degree of critical thinking and graphical excellence.

Thanks for putting this together @plaschkalab.bsky.social @rupertfaraway.bsky.social and @thezenklusen.bsky.social

Apply now to attend the next EMBO Bacterial Networks meeting #EMBOBacNet

🗓️13-18 September 2026
📍Sant Feliu de Guixols, Spain

📝Program and registration info: meetings.embo.org/event/26-bac...

👩‍🔬Organised with co-chair @s-lab.bsky.social and ECR @coralietesseur.bsky.social

#MicroSky

Flagellar location determines the stability of bacterial surface entrapment | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

CRISPR-Cas–mediated heritable chromosome fusions in Arabidopsis The genome of Arabidopsis thaliana consists of 10 chromosomes. By inducing CRISPR-Cas–mediated breaks at subcentromeric and subtelomeric sequences, we fused entire chromosome arms, obtaining two eight...

And now we have Arabidopsis plants with 8 chromosomes instead of 10 and no obvious phenotypic differences, this week in @science.org
#PlantScience
Paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Perspective here:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Directed evolution of phages in biofilms enhances Pseudomonas aeruginosa control through improved lipopolysaccharide recognition - Nature Communications Phage therapy holds potential against Pseudomonas aeruginosa chronic lung infections in cystic fibrosis patients. Here, the authors demonstrate that biofilm heterogeneity limits phage effectiveness an...

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

Finally published!
Our new study in Curr Biol @currentbiology.bsky.social analyzes how CYP707A1 promoter variation drives an evolutionary trade-off between stomatal defense and gas exchange across Brassicaceae species.
Free-access link:
authors.elsevier.com/a/1m7H93QW8S...

New guidance was published to aid academics/SMEs with interpreting the MHRA “Regulatory considerations for therapeutic use of bacteriophages in the UK”, published earlier this year.
Read the interpretation guidance here: doi.org/10.1099/mic.... #MicrobioJ

Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The type VI secretion system and associated effector proteins - Nature Reviews Microbiology In this Review, Basler and colleagues examine the type VI secretion system (T6SS), focusing on the diversity of antibacterial T6SS effectors and the evolutionary forces that shape them. They explain h...

#microsky on the Type VI secretion system (T6SS)

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

Specialized shuttle proteins recognize Type IX secretion signals and target effectors to their final destinations in Flavobacterium johnsoniae Communications Biology - Bacteroidota use the Type IX secretion system to secrete proteins with a conserved C-terminal domain (CTD) secretion signal domain. Type B CTDs require specific shuttle...

Happy to share the last paper form the lab:
Specialized shuttle proteins recognize
T9SS signals and target
effectors to their final destinations. Great work by @maellepllt.bsky.social, led by @thicoz.bsky.social in collaboration with @audebertstephane.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Metagenomic editing of commensal bacteria in vivo using CRISPR-associated transposases Although metagenomic sequencing has revealed a rich microbial biodiversity in the mammalian gut, methods to genetically alter specific species in the microbiome are highly limited. Here, we introduce ...

Are you expecting a new age of microbiome engineering
Metagenomic editing of commensal bacteria in vivo using CRISPR-associated transposases
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Many nice #RNA & #ribosome papers in the latest issue of @narjournal.bsky.social 🦠💫 academic.oup.com/nar/issue/53...
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