Chris Thomas

This was a very productive two days which helped us to explore new ways in which FEMS can support member societies.

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Research advances on ‘displacing’ antibiotic resistance gene from bacteria - University of Birmingham The research is on plasmids, small, circular strands of DNA, that allow bacteria to share genes rapidly, and carry genes conferring antibiotic resistance.

‪Chris Thomas‬
Our commercialisation arm, University of Birmingham Enterprise Ltd, issued a press release last week (bit.ly/3SBfuLq) related to our recent Nucleic Acids Research paper (bit.ly/4lSyCSH ) and other on-going work.

Thought provoking. I would like to see an accompanying analysis. Is Ukraine's position affected by the war?

The paper is now live: academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Absolutely delighted to play a role in this fascinating story!

This week's highlight was the 2nd ISPB Virtual Seminar 2025 (www.plasmidbiologysociety.org/ispb-virtual...) organised by Manuel Ares Arroyo, Fabienne Benz and Pedro Dorado Morales (Inst Pasteur) Great talks by Maho Tokuda and Celia Souque. You can still sign up if you have not already done so.

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I said this to you in person last week, but that is really great news Ilyas- well done and thoroughly deserved. And a MIBTP alumnus!

Activation, incompatibility, and displacement of FIB replicons in E. coli Abstract. Multi-replicon sex-factor F is the archetype of the largest plasmid group in clinical Enterobacteriaceae. Such plasmids spread antimicrobial resi

The study on the FIB replicon of plasmid F that I talked about at Plasmid Biology 2022 in Toulouse is eventually published in Nucleic Acids Research: academic.oup.com/nar/article-...

At what stage will someone decide that NCBI should not be a worldwide resource?

That should have said Tung Le

The second great paper concerns the discovery in Eva Top's group that an enigmatic protein encoded by IncP-1beta plasmids modulates the IncP-1 circuitry in E. coli to make the plasmid a burden in this host: Elg et al recently accepted in Molecular Biology and Evolution doi.org/10.1093/molb...

KorB switching from DNA-sliding clamp to repressor mediates long-range gene silencing in a multi-drug resistance plasmid - Nature Microbiology Structural and single-molecule analyses show the CTPase, KorB, is a sliding DNA clamp that interacts with a clamp-locking protein KorA to inhibit gene expression over distances of more than 1 kb in th...

It is a privilege to be an author on two great plasmid papers already this year. The first was McLean et al in Nature Microbiology focused on KorB and the discovery that it is a CTPase by Yung Le's group at the John Innes Institute in Norwich. www.nature.com/articles/s41...