Jose Bengoechea

Great @imibirmingham.bsky.social seminar by the brilliant @josebengoechea.bsky.social who has uncovered another cool and important mechanisms in Klebsiella pneumoniae virulence (no spoilers because unpublished data)

🔬 New work from the Mazel Lab engineers programmable conjugative plasmids to selectively target MDR bacteria and the resistance plasmid pOXA-48, blocking its spread in complex communities.

✍️ @amazeld.bsky.social & coll. @pasteur.fr
📖 shorturl.at/GZdJu

#MicroSky #AntibioticResistance #Conjugation

Will UKRI’s funding buckets shore up UK research’s sandcastle? Academics’ concerns are mounting as news drips out of the research councils about cuts and freezes ahead of a major funding restructuring intended to promote interdisciplinarity and transparency. But ...

I am rather worried that this government not only will actively fail UK universities but also screw over one of the gems of UK economy - science and life science, particularly.

Will UKRI's funding buckets shore up UK research? share.google/B92vQ7E6nEOK...

👋LSHTM offers #scholarships to tackle barriers to education for students from all backgrounds.

Check out our First and Next Generation Scholarships for home fee students & those interested in distance learning MSc programmes.

Apply by 27 March 2026👉 www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/fees-a...

Virtual webinar on safe microbiome perturbations focusing on gut microbiome and probiotics, scheduled for 26 February 2026.

Join us this Thursday for our online seminar series, Safe Microbiome Perturbations. Featuring a live discussion on 'Gut Microbiome and Probiotics.' Register now: https://microb.io/3OBhVPs

#GutMicrobiome #WebinarSeries

Bacterial metabolic remodeling by convergent evolution unlocks nutrient availability after a host switch Staphylococcus aureus has undergone metabolic remodeling to adapt to the dairy niche.

Insights into how #Staph aureus adapts to the bovine host by unlocking nutrients from the dairy niche. Great work by Amy Pickering, Jamie Gorzynski and others in the group. Bacterial metabolic remodeling by convergent evolution after a host switch.|Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

On this plus side, the number of billionaires in the UK rose from 15 in 1990 to 165 in 2024.

Huzzah!

A perfect example of how to damage irreversibly a funding system that was eorking in a reasonable manner. Instead of increasing responsive mode funding, the option chosen is centralization of the budget on UKRI to deliver....nothing...while damaging ECRs.

Intestinal epithelial TLR5 signaling promotes barrier-supportive macrophages Colonic stem cell TLR5 sensing of microbes promotes macrophage recruitment and maturation to support intestinal barrier repair.

#WeekendRead #MicrobiotaPower! Tsai, @diehllab.bsky.social &co show @ Science Immunology that E. coli flagellin is recognized by TLR5 on intestinal epithelial stem cells to recruit gut protective CCR2+ monocyte-derived macrophages, decreasing colitis! #IBDs doi.org/10.1126/sciimmunol.adr4057

Milestone of the lab...10000 strains in our collection!

#Klebsiella infections are a serious & growing #PublicHealth threat

For #AntimicrobialAwarenessWeek, @josebengoechea.bsky.social discusses the dangers of bacterial infections, antimicrobial resistance & the global efforts to tackle it. @lshtmamrcentre.bsky.social

www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...

How to Apply - MRC London Intercollegiate Doctoral Training Partnership Studentships MRC LID is open for application for 2026-27 PRE-APPLICATION STEPS 1. Find out more about...

For anyone interested in doing a PhD at the interface of microbiology and immunology focusing on how AMR pathogens subvert host defenses...you may consider applying to our MRC LID DTP project in which we will explore how Klebsiella hijacks the immune checkpoint PD-L1 mrc-lid.lshtm.ac.uk/apply/

Bacterial warfare is associated with virulence and antimicrobial resistance - Nature Communications Bacteria employ a range of competition systems that deliver toxins to inhibit competing strains. This study shows that these systems are particularly important for the ecology of virulent and antibiot...

So happy to share this! Bacteriocins were first discovered over 100 years ago, but what do they actually do? We look at >1000 bacteriocin plasmids and find links to virulence and antimicrobial resistance, and frequent bacteriocin sharing in Enterobacteriaceae.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The value of public R&D

Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that £1 of public R&D investment generates £8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term
www.gov.uk/government/p...

What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision Supervisors who invest in positive mentoring relationships with their PhD candidates also reap the benefits for their own research.

What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Genome-wide screen to identify Escherichia coli gene knockouts hypersensitive to trimethoprim and chloramphenicol. Top left: Schematic showing the screening strategy for identifying hypersensitive gene knockouts from the Keio mutant library. All mutants were cultured in LB and LB supplemented with trimethoprim (TMP) and chloramphenicol (CMP) at their respective IC50s. Top right: Distribution of drug-susceptibilities of Keio mutants grown in indicated growth media obtained after normalizing the growth of each mutant to wild type (set to 1). Mean ± S.D. derived after fitting each distribution to a Gaussian function are shown. Bottom left: Analysis of gene functional categories for hypersensitive mutants compared with the frequency of genes in each category encoded by E. coli K-12 MG1655. Percentage of the total in each case is provided above each bar. Bottom right: Comparison of hypersensitive mutants identified in the trimethoprim and chloramphenicol screens shown as a Venn diagram. Representative genes from each set are named and gene names are colored by functional categories.

Intrinsic resistance pathways & #ResistanceBreaking. Study shows that inhibiting efflux pumps & cell envelope biogenesis sensitizes #bacteria to #antibiotics, but rapid evolutionary recovery may limit long-term effectiveness of resistance-breaking strategies #AMR @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4huAtvo

Enhanced virulence and stress tolerance are signatures of epidemiologically successful Shigella sonnei
@sydneylmiles.bsky.social @katholt.bsky.social
🙏to transformative collaborative effort

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

Non-conjugative plasmids limit their mobility to persist in nature Sabnis et al. explain why non-conjugative plasmids move at a low rate in nature. While increased mobility can easily evolve by incorporating phage DNA into plasmids, this is disadvantageous because it...

New paper with my (amazing) friend and mentor @jrpenades.bsky.social
Really looking forward to see what plasmid aficionados think of this one!!
With @asantoslopez.bsky.social @wfigueroac3.bsky.social Akshay Sabins and others
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

#WHO report shows rising #antibiotic resistance in common bacteria

@katholt.bsky.social & @josebengoechea.bsky.social explain resistance worryingly high in #Klebsiella & E.coli as 1 in 6 lab-confirmed #bacterial infections in 2023 shown resistant to antibiotics.

www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/n...

My nose must be riddled with S. aureus then 🫠

𝘒𝘭𝘦𝘣𝘴𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢 𝘱𝘯𝘦𝘶𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘢𝘦 is a Gram-negative, non-motile, straight rod-shaped bacterium that can divide rapidly, with some strains having a median doubling time of < 30 min, forming biofilms that interfere with both antibiotic and immune clearance

What an incredible week for @julielebris.bsky.social with one published ms in @asm.org #mBio on #capsule phenotypic heterogeneity & a preprint on the modular evolution of a highly exchangeable locus ⏩️capsule 😅
All her hard work is paying off!
#ProudPI
#microsky @klebclub.bsky.social
Check her 🧵👇🏻

Cool work Lindsay, congrats.

Single-cell analysis of genetically minimized Salmonella reveals effector gene cooperation in vivo - Nature Microbiology A minimal effector subset enables Salmonella Typhimurium to overcome bottlenecks regulated by the early innate immune response and establish infection within a CD62L+ monocyte niche in the spleen.

#NewResearch

This study uses Salmonella strains genetically engineered to express minimal effector subsets and mass cytometry to characterise infection of the spleen, revealing bottlenecks overcome by these effectors

#MicroSky

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

A good way to think about institutional research culture!

Good opportunity here to work with a super talented new PI.

Maybe I am being grumpy, but can people please stop using poorly curated databases of antibiotic resistance genes (I am looking at you, DeepARG) on shotgun metagenomic data and then present these results without any reflection on their validity, or shortcomings of databases?

Schematic overview of benchmarking approach, highlighting the optimized pipeline.

New in #JClinMicro! An optimized, streamlined nanopore-only workflow for epidemiologic analysis of bacterial pathogens, enabling outbreak analysis with performance comparable to that of Illumina short-read sequencing.
Get the details: asm.social/2wd

Systematic discovery of antibacterial and antifungal bacterial toxins - Nature Microbiology Genome sequence mining and computational analyses lead to the discovery and functional characterization of conserved bacterial toxins with activity against bacteria and fungi.

Several years of work with several great collaborators, that combined computational biology, molecular microbiology, biochemistry, structural biology and mycology assay culminated in today's publication on discovery of novel bacterial toxins:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

There are half a million cases of invasive non-Typhoidal Salmonella (iNTS) every year and while you might know S. Typhimurim and Enteritidis, you may not have heard of S. Panama 💩 🩸 🧫 💊 Check out our latest in @lancetmicrobe.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.la... and the 🧵 below to find out more 1/n