Honour McCann

Nice to see disease in its natural habitat 😄

Courtesy of its vector yes 😁

Strains from the clove-infecting lineage grow more slowly than the banana infecting ones and are only found at higher elevations. Since we were under some time pressure to get them onto plates as early as possible to inform later sampling decisions, we sampled at nightfall and processed that night.

After a long drive into Central Java, we set up the mobile lab in the plantation office

Within four days of landing lab HQ was set up, hundreds of plates were poured and we were in the field sampling for Ralstonia on clove.

Lab HQ for this trip is in the brand new Agrotropica Learning Center at UGM 👌

Landed in Indonesia to continue the hunt for Ralstonia syzygii! After piles of paperwork, the real work begins..

AGO5 restricts virus vertical transmission in plant gametophytes The propagation of a viral infection from a host parent to its progeny is known as vertical transmission, or seed transmission in plants. It allows viral infections to rapidly spread locally via polle...

Preprint alert! It is my great pleasure to announce the first manuscript from the lab, a story that started @gmivienna.bsky.social and was mainly accomplished by the intrepid @gesahoffmann.bsky.social at @mpi-mp-potsdam.bsky.social. A brief thread with our findings
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What is the best strategy to win any contest?

Eliminate your opponents of course.

Recently, my friend @fernpizza.bsky.social showed how plasmids compete intracellularly (check out his paper published in Science today!). With @baym.lol, we now know they can fight.

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

Thanks, very proud 😁

Thanks for making the trip @neher.io to give a talk and participate in the examination with @plantevolution.bsky.social and Daniel Huson! Looking forward to sharing Daria’s work and collabs soon 🥳

Also - check out her hat - it’s customary in Germany for lab members to decorate a hat with little mementos of the doctoral journey. The lab really nailed the goth princess pathogen vibe 😁 Daria will work on ancient outbreaks of Yersinia pestis with Maria Spyrou for her postdoc

Presenting Dr. Daria Evseeva! Daria defended her thesis at @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social last week and earned her doctorate - with distinction! She worked on a historic outbreak of Ralstonia in Martinique, the origins of the banana outbreak in Indonesia, and the evolution of intermicrobial antagonism.

I will be so chalant when they tell me off for snacking in the new lecture hall 😅😂

😂

There’s a leak - and a conceptual artist - at the Max Planck 👌

Glad you liked the session!

It was an amazing sciences day at #2025ISMPMI!
Right after the “Population, biology, ecology and genomics” session, I had the opportunity to have lunch and discuss about this topic with the co-chair @honour.bsky.social

Identifying phage proteins that activate the bacterial innate immune system Bacteria have evolved sophisticated antiphage systems that halt phage replication upon detecting specific phage triggers. Identifying phage triggers is crucial to our understanding of immune signaling...

#phagesky

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

Our paper demonstrating that within-species warfare interactions are ecologically important on human skin is now published in Nature Micro! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Prevalent chromosome fusion in Vibrio cholerae O1 - Nature Communications The pathogenic bacterium Vibrio cholerae typically has two circular chromosomes. Here, Cuénod et al. analyse 467 clinical isolates and identify several independent chromosome fusion events that are li...

One of my favourite serendipitous results from the lab came about because we were long-read sequencing bacterial:

Vibrio cholerae, which is "supposed to" have TWO circular chromosomes (3 + 1 million base pairs) often has just ONE fused chromosome (4 Mbp).

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

(1/n)

Cell-type-specific execution of effector-triggered immunity

Our new preprint is online, 1 July⬇️

With @himanshuchhillar.bsky.social @leonardojo.bsky.social Amey Redkar @kaisakajala.bsky.social @jonathandgjones.bsky.social

For early readers & community feedback🙏🏼

#openscience @erc.europa.eu

Cocktail clarification in progress

Black Forest Lab Retreat! Great hikes, exploding kittens* and milk-washed cocktails. *The card game

This is what a multi-floor meeting looks like at the @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social. Love a good science lobby 😁

New Paper out!

apsjournals.apsnet.org/doi/epdf/10....

We wanted to know how much genetic variation exists for Zymoseptoria in a single wheat field.

ERC Consolidator Grant for Hassan Salem Max Planck Research Group Leader Hassan Salem has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to investigate how beetles use symbiotic relationships with microbes to digest plant material and how this stra...

Congratulations to @hassansalem.bsky.social on the #ERC Consolidator Grant! 🎉 The project explores how beetles use symbiotic relationships w/ microbes to digest plant material, & compare this to gene transfer for digestive enzyme acquisition. 🪲tinyurl.com/bdhrdnes
Evolutionary insights to come!

The phased pan-genome of tetraploid European potato - Nature A haplotype-resolved pan-genome of autotetraploid European potato founder lines shows high nucleotide diversity at remarkably low haplotype diversity, which is probably the result of hybridization eve...

📢 Excited to share our work out now in @nature.com! 📢

We present the phased pan-genome of tetraploid European potato, based on 10 historical cultivars representing 85% of European potato diversity.

Learn more below!

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/7

Bacterial pathogen deploys the iminosugar glycosyrin to manipulate plant glycobiology The extracellular space (apoplast) in plants is a key battleground during microbial infections. To avoid recognition, the bacterial model phytopathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 produces ...

Pseudomonas syringae secretes the iminosugar glycosyrin to block plant immune recognition. It mimics galactose to inhibit β-galactosidase, disrupt flagellin sensing, and rewire host glycobiology!
doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Huge congrats to Tee and everyone involved!
#PlantImmunity #PlantChemeticsLab

New postdoc position in our lab (2 y+): evolutionary genomics of integrons and MGEs with focus on vibrio-phage interactions. Great environment @pasteur.fr for science, career building. Super collaborators @celineloot.bsky.social @amazeld.bsky.social @fredoleroux.bsky.social 3 weeks to apply!