Matt Frieman

Much appreciated. Give some of these folks a follow
go.bsky.app/LQZYUdE

This whole thread is great. I want to run a journal club where we only read these papers!

Title of paper from Proc B, says "Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency"

Oooh! Taught a whole class on trade-offs this past spring. This was a class favorite (maybe because I brought in a bunch of chilies and the students were all game to try them!)

Every year my lecture on evolution includes this slide of tradeoffs with Howler monkey call video and graphs of ball size. I can’t stop myself

“With these considerations, we expect to fund through the 4th percentile.”

There it is, in black and white, the destruction of cancer research in the US.

Characterization of extensive diversity in immunoglobulin light chain variable germline genes across biomedically important mouse strains
@immunohorizons.bsky.social
academic.oup.com/immunohorizo...

Me & my labmates posing for a photo together on a rooftop deck

Officially finished out #ASV2025 with the best crew!

What a privilege it was to spend 4 full days totally immersed in learning about the incredible research being done across the globe.

#lovevirology and #lovemylab

#ASV2025, this is from #ASV2017! Recognize anyone? @amersocvirology.bsky.social

This is getting lots of good traction, so if you are a student looking for a PHD STUDENT POSITION in biology, I would love to add you! Be sure to add your research interests in your bio and/or a pinned post so PIs can find you.

Frieman Lab enjoying night 2 of #ASV2025

Altered IgG4 antibody response to repeated mRNA versus recombinant protein SARS-CoV-2 vaccines Dear Editor,

Interestingly, it’s not seen with Novavax Spike vaccine! www.journalofinfection.com/article/S016...

TLDR

Charlie Rice is the only scientist who could get a Nobel Prize for his findings and give a keynote address at #ASV2025 and never mention he won a Nobel Prize! #LoveVirology

This seems...bad.

archive.is/2025.05.04-2...

NA imprinting in humans likely influences age-related risk of zoonotic H5N1 and H9N2 based on analysis of available data. Wonder about how age affects exposure relative to susceptibility?
👉 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations!

Frank Stahl, screen capture from: https://youtu.be/7-tnuAqEp9g

RIP Franklin W. Stahl (1929–2025)

here is Frank explaining semiconservative replication of DNA in the marvelous interview from 2020 together with Matt Meselson (youtu.be/7-tnuAqEp9g)

🔬Calling all microbiologists. 🔬 Ever feel like your paper is too small for some journals, but too solid to sit on?
#FEMSMicrobes welcomes well-executed microbiology manuscripts, and they put special attention on promoting ECR authors, eg the webinar below. 👇 @femsjournals.bsky.social @femsmicro.org

Dear #TheBear. Please don’t screw this season up. The world is imploding. We all need a season that is crazy but has resolution. If it could please land perfectly at the end, I will be ever grateful.

Thanks

Matt

PS. Never enough Faks

Applications are now open! We are recruiting 20 Assistant Professors in a wide range of subject areas. We're looking for early-career researchers with strong scientific merits and future potential.
🔗 All positions: ki.se/en/about-ki/...

new version up. www.cdc.gov/acip/downloa...

Are you at #ASM205? Go see Devon Riley, my grad student (with co-mentor Bobby Ernst), present her poster #CIV-P-303 on Saturday about "Optimizing An Avian Influenza Vaccine Using a Novel Bacterial Enzymatic Combinatorial Chemistry (BECC) TLR4 Adjuvant". Its a great story!

Dr. Susan Weiss at ASM Microbe.

Up next at the #ASMicrobe Opening Session: a discussion with Dr. Susan Weiss, recipient of the ASM 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, about her exceptional contributions to the field of microbiology and coronavirus research, moderated by Dr. Brenda Hogue.

Our latest preprint is now available doi.org/10.1101/2025...! Led by my postdoc, Luqiang Guo @luqiang.bsky.social, we determined a ~2.4 A resolution structure of the hantavirus glycoprotein tetramer on the surface of VLPs. Also determined structures of dimers of tetramers and Fab-bound tetramers.

😮

The furin cleavage site is required for pathogenesis, but not transmission, of SARS-CoV-2 | Journal of Virology The presence of the furin cleavage site (FCS) within the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 distinguishes it from other sarbecoviruses found in nature. While prior works have deleted the FCS, these mutant viruses also shortened the S1/S2 loop, which is known to ...

Our new paper on SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site is now out at JVI.

Study examines disruption (rather than deletion) of the FCS & maintains the longer S1/S2 loop found in #SARS2.

FCS disruption attenuates pathogenesis, but not required (but helps) transmission.

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Two tenure-track positions at Amherst College www.amherst.edu.

apply.interfolio.com/168795 (molecular genetics and biochemistry)
apply.interfolio.com/168794 (molecular/cellular neurobiology)

Influenza filaments: a graveyard of postdocs no longer? | The EMBO Journal EMBO Press is an editorially independent publishing platform for the development of EMBO scientific publications.

Really enjoyed writing about one of my favorite topics (influenza filaments). There is so much exciting new filament research now, it is clearly no longer 'the graveyard of postdocs' Bob Lamb called the topic during my PhD. www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Adjuvantation of a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine with controlled tissue-specific expression of an mRNA encoding IL-12p70 Adjuvanting BNT162b2 with IL-12p70–MOP amplified and extended the durability of vaccine-elicited immune responses in aged mice.

Everyone is behind this one, www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Enhancing the protection of influenza virus vaccines with BECC TLR4 adjuvant in aged mice - PubMed Influenza A virus (IAV) is a leading cause of respiratory disease worldwide often resulting in severe morbidity and mortality. We have previously shown that the Bacterial Enzymatic Combinatorial Chemi...

Just have to make it a better antigen with a better adjuvant. Perhaps the one we work on!

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36639569/