James Connolly

Another brilliant opportunity to work the fantastic Andreas in St Andrews!

Unraveling posttranscriptional regulatory networks in phage infection Phages employ sophisticated transcriptional regulatory networks to optimize replication. Recently, Silverman et al. used RIL-seq (RNA interaction by l…

Like bacteria, phages use sRNAs to regulate gene expression! Out today in @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social, @mvelascogomariz.bsky.social and I highlight a recent RIL-seq study from the @saharmelamed.bsky.social lab that looked into posttranscriptional regulation of lambda!

tinyurl.com/lambda-RIL-seq

Last chance to apply for this exciting PhD with us. Deadline tomorrow the 27th of February!

Superb opportunity to learn from one of the smartest scientists I know. And a lovely place to live so what’s not to like! Apply now!

Early bird registration for VTEC 2026 ends this Friday (February 27th). Please share with your networks and consider registering for this great One-health conference covering all topics VTEC related, taking place in Aberdeen on the 10-13th of May.

Loss of Fsr quorum sensing promotes biofilm formation and worsens outcomes in enterococcal infective endocarditis - Nature Communications Infective endocarditis (IE) is an understudied biofilm-associated infection. Here, analyses of preclinical and clinical data reveal that the Fsr quorum sensing (QS) system of Enterococcus faecalis is ...

What if quorum sensing doesn’t promote biofilms - but restrains it? 🤔

New work from @harisantypas.bsky.social shows that the Fsr QS system in Enterococcus faecalis acts as a brake on biofilm formation and pathogenesis during infective endocarditis (IE).

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

Recurrent and chronic UTIs have a huge impact on patient's quality of life and is an area of research which is often overlooked and understudied. There are massive gaps in our understanding which we can fill to... (1/3)

See all images in this post and that follow for the top 10!

#MicroSky #UTISky

Mechanism and reconstitution of circadian transcription in cyanobacteria - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Fang et al. reveal how a bacterial circadian clock turns genes on and off at the right times of day and use the purified proteins to drive circadian gene transcription in a test tube for days.

Mechanism and reconstitution of circadian transcription in cyanobacteria

in @natsmb.nature.com by Mingxu Fang et al from Sudan Golden @kevincorbett.bsky.social Yulia Yuzenkova

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

Bidirectional promoters in Escherichia coli: regulatory rules and implications for gene expression noise Abstract. In prokaryotes, bidirectional promoters are pseudo-symmetrical DNA sequences that stimulate divergent transcription. Ubiquitous, and far more lik

@ewarman.bsky.social has followed up on her discovery of bidirectional promoters in bacteria by defining their basic rules for regulation and links to gene expression noise...

academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

In our most recent work David Forrest has discovered a widespread mechanisms linking transcription initiation to DNA supercoiling...

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

🔔Collabator Alert🔔

I’m putting together a project on UTIs and the urogenital microbiome and am looking for a collaborator with solid metagenomic sequencing/analysis experience. If you’d be interested in joining the work, I’d love to talk

#MicroSky #UTISky

Still lots of time to apply for this exciting project with us. Please share and encourage interested students to get in touch.

Or this one: how metals influence host-bacteria interactions in the gut, with @ruamicro.bsky.social and @banzhaflab.bsky.social at Newcastle.

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Nutrient uptake in commensal bacteria: exploring uncharacterised TonB-dependent transporters. at Newcastle University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Nutrient uptake in commensal bacteria: exploring uncharacterised TonB-dependent transporters. at Newcastle University, listed on FindAPhD.com

Lots of PhD opportunities for UK + international students involving my lab. Topics relate to metals & microbiology.

First up: TonB-dependent receptors in commensal Neisseria in my lab at Durham, with @kjosts.bsky.social and @mattbashton.bsky.social.

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Microbial metal-head: the integrated roles of metal homeostasis in host-pathogen interaction at Newcastle University on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Microbial metal-head: the integrated roles of metal homeostasis in host-pathogen interaction at Newcastle University, listed on FindAPhD.com

PhD position available in our team to study how UPEC exploits metals to successfully colonise the host gut. Cool collaboration with @thecopperdoctor.bsky.social and @banzhaflab.bsky.social Please share and get in touch for more details

New preprint from my lab (with Arya Kaul, @fernpizza.bsky.social, and @brinda.eu), in which we explore new genes hitchhiking on the beneficial deletion that fused them together, and find them in the LTEE, M. Tb/bovis, and across the bacterial tree of life

Mycobacterium tuberculosis overcomes phosphate starvation by extensively remodelling its lipidome with phosphorus-free lipids - Nature Communications Here, the authors show that Mycobacterium tuberculosis manipulates lipid metabolism to overcome host restriction, by remodelling its lipidome and utilising host lipids as an alternative phosphate sour...

We’re excited to share our latest study that reshapes our understanding of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) lipid composition, with major implications for drug discovery, immunity, and vaccine development.

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

A thread.

Bacterial population structure and clade-specific sampling affect machine learning predictions of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Top: An illustration of defining clades for genomes in one species. R: resistant (triangles), S: susceptible (circles). Bottom left: An example of training scenarios for scheme B based on the clade splitting in shown above. Models were trained on all samples except for resistant or susceptible samples from one clade. The held-out genomes from the same clade were used as the test sets. Bottom right: The precision and recall scores for scheme B; a-random and b-random indicate testing on random train-test splits of the pathological unbalanced data.

#MachineLearning methods are used to predict #AntimicrobialResistance #AMR from genomic data. @lbarquist.bsky.social &co show that sampling biases driven by population structure severely undermine the accuracy of AMR prediction models even with large datasets @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4iZ0zXQ

There is still Time to submit an abstract for VTEC 2026! Don’t miss out on the opportunity to present your work on any aspect of VTEC at this longstanding meeting!

Finally out! Right on time for the holidays 🎄🎁
Big thanks to Nick Scott, @giseladivenanzio.bsky.social, Clay and Mario @feldmanlab.bsky.social who made it happen!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Join our live webinar today at 16:00 (GMT) to hear more about the VTEC conference, and why you should come. STEC/VTEC continues to be priority pathogen. The aim is to share cutting-edge scientific knowledge, addressing the questions about why the outbreaks occur and how best to manage this pathogen.

Fantastic to have Prof Matthias Wilmanns from EMBL Hamburg hosted by @kshbeckham.bsky.social to give a @mhd-newcastle.bsky.social seminar on mycobacterial infection #dreamtheme

Uncharted territory - the Akkermansia muciniphila import system at University of Birmingham on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Uncharted territory - the Akkermansia muciniphila import system at University of Birmingham, listed on FindAPhD.com

💎MRC AIM PhD advert💎 Uncharted territory - the Akkermansia muciniphila import system.

Liang Wu, David Tourigny, and I are looking for someone to work on how A. muciniphila imports mucin.

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

🔊 Interested in doing a PhD on RNA-binding proteins in an abundant microbiota species and becoming a member of the German Priority Programme “Illuminating Gene Functions in the Human Gut Microbiome”? Apply here: www.uni-wuerzburg.de/karriere/sin...

Today, we are lucky to have Imane El Meouche from IAME, France to give a MCM seminar @medicalsciencesncl.bsky.social (chaired by @henrikstrahl.bsky.social) on antibiotics tolerance in E. Coli

Why does daptomycin resistance appear so fast in Enterococcus? We finally have a clue.

DAP resistance in enterococci pops up quickly. What’s been missing is why resistance-associated membrane changes look the way they do, and why the classic path of mutations is so predictable.

EASTBIO: When Phages Collide: Understanding How Multiple Prophages Shape Bacterial Behaviour at University of St Andrews on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - EASTBIO: When Phages Collide: Understanding How Multiple Prophages Shape Bacterial Behaviour at University of St Andrews, listed on FindAPhD.com

Fabulous opportunity to study phage biology with Andreas Haag in St Andrews. Don’t miss out.

Theres still time to apply for our PhD project on UPEC/immune cell interactions. Deadline December 4th

A unique inhibitor conformation selectively targets the DNA polymerase PolC of Gram-positive priority pathogens - Nature Communications In this work, Urem et al. characterize the mode of action as well as mechanism of reduced susceptibility related to a class of antimicrobials that is in development for the treatment of infections wit...

🚨 Publication alert! We are stoked to report the structural basis for activity of a novel class of antimicrobials targeting Gram positive priority pathogens in @natcomms.nature.com. There is something for everyone on this paper, and I will highlight a few things below 👇 1/9 doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Looks like a great meeting :)