Josie Elliott

📢 Opportunity to apply for a PhD fellowship to join our group and work on MGE-MGE interactions and phage defence systems!
@mmsb-lyon.bsky.social

See informations about eligibility and research project on this web page: graduate-plus.fr/immunology-v...

Contact me if you are interested !

Thank you so much, you're too kind haha! ☺️

Thanks! It was 97, I've seen people not getting it with scores of 95 and 96, so I'm feeling really lucky 😅

Thank you! I feel insanely lucky after seeing the stats this year

Thank you! 😊

Thank you!! Honestly doesn't feel real 😅

🎉Extremely happy that Josie Elliott was awarded a MCSA postdoctoral fellowship to continue our work on the competition between mobile genetic elements in bacteria ! Congratulations !

I'm excited and grateful to share that I have been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc fellowship for my work with @annechevallereau.bsky.social at @mmsb-lyon.bsky.social. I feel incredibly lucky and I'm looking forward to getting to work on all the phage-y experiments we have planned 🧫

Thank you so much!

Thank youuuu, next time might progress from medieval to renaissance themed poster haha

Two conferences two weeks apart, thank you to everyone who came and chatted to me at my poster (or in general) at the Phages.fr conference in Nancy and the @microbiologysociety.org #MicroEvo25 conference in Liverpool. It was great to show the first data from my postdoc and get advice and feedback

A Farewell to Arms: The Trade-off Between Growth and Defence in Bacteria (York YBDTP Project) at University of York on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - A Farewell to Arms: The Trade-off Between Growth and Defence in Bacteria (York YBDTP Project) at University of York, listed on FindAPhD.com

Two fully-funded PhD openings in my research group at the University of York.
If you’re excited about viromes, phage biology, Nanopore sequencing, soils and the odd bit of alpine or agricultural field sampling, we’d love to hear from you!
🌱🦠🏔️

tiny.cc/c4pv001
tiny.cc/e4pv001

JOB OFFER #PhageSky

We have a postdoc position opening in my group to investigate phage-MGE interactions !

We're based in the very nice city of Lyon, France @mmsb-lyon.bsky.social

Contact me for more info !

>> Apply on the CNRS webpage emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

We're looking for a technician at Institut Pasteur for experimental work on satellite-phage-bacteria interactions, working directly with @jmouradesousa.bsky.social and myself in the lab of @epcrocha.bsky.social ! ANR funded.

Link to the job emploi.pasteur.fr/offre-de-emp...
Thx for sharing!

Thank you Zamin!

🎉🧪 The MEEP lab @mmsb.cnrs.fr celebrates its first anniversary!

A year of experiments, caffeine-fueled late nights, and nerdy excitement. 🚀🔬

I'm very grateful to the team of amazing #WomenInScience who joined this incredible journey
@josie-e.bsky.social
Clarisse Plantady and Elodie Kenck.

Thanks Ellinor, I'm happy to have my CRISPR child released out into the world!

Huge thank you to the lovely co-authors who made this work possible @taylorlabgroup.bsky.social Edze Westra @bridgetwatson.bsky.social @pinkpetri.bsky.social @gretelwaugh.bsky.social and Yueyi Cai

This nutrient dependent efficacy of CRISPR-Cas interference on phage was a really cool finding and potentially opens up bigger questions about what we might be missing when we screen phage and defence systems in only optimal growth conditions.

We ran all our initial tests in optimal high nutrient conditions. However, when we re-tested some of our CRISPR-impervious phage again in low nutrient conditions we found that two of these phages could no longer resist CRISPR defences, allowing the bacteria to grow unaffected by phage lysis!

Interestingly we found that CRISPR worked great against a variety of temperate and virulent phages across a range of infection metrics. However, a few phages were resistant to CRISPR, some which made sense (jumbo phage) and others not.

Once integrated into the P. aeruginosa genome the synthetic CRISPR-Cas system worked great against plasmids, so we turned our system against a panel of phage to see if, when given targeting spacers, we could find patterns as to what phages CRISPR does and doesn’t work against.

Because I put restriction sites around all parts of the CRISPR-Cas genes, including the spacers, it made it simple to swap out the spacers with cheap primers before integrating the whole system back into the genome of P. aeruginosa, thus allowing us to target this system against any phage we wanted.

We were interested into diving deeper on understanding how useful CRISPR-Cas systems are to the bacteria that carry or acquire them. So at the start of my PhD I spent many hours creating a synthetic, minimal, modular version of the type IF CRISPR-Cas system of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Phage susceptibility to a minimal, modular synthetic CRISPR-Cas system in Pseudomonas aeruginosa is nutrient dependent | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences CRISPR-Cas systems can provide adaptive, heritable immunity to their prokaryotic hosts against invading genetic material such as phages. It is clear that the importance of acquiring CRISPR-Cas immunit...

Can CRISPR-Cas systems target any phage? Yes, no, it depends? What does it depend on? The second paper from my PhD came out today in a special issue of Phil Trans B on the ecology and evolution of bacterial immune systems
doi.org/10.1098/rstb...

PhD opportunity, please share:

We are looking for a prospective PhD student to start in October 2026 who is excited about bacteria (Klebsiella pneumoniae), how they interact, and how they exchange DNA.
All details can be found on the funder website 👉 gw4biomed.ac.uk/developing-c...

Want to name a real virus? I have recently discovered 9 new phages which now need names! To enter, you simply need to donate to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust on my JustGiving page (£2 = 1 entry) and share your email with me on donation (see link info). Please share 💚 www.justgiving.com/page/meaghan-c-1

Fast phages outcompete by depleting host resources In nature, phages frequently coinfect bacteria, leading to inter-species competition. Furthermore, phage therapy often involves using a cocktail of different species to circumvent bacterial resistance...

Honored to have our paper featured in the Spotlight of @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social
by authors @josie-e.bsky.social & @annechevallereau.bsky.social

Thank you for making our work more accessible and highlighting its relevance!
www.cell.com/trends/microbiology/fulltext/S0966-842X%2825%2900158-1

✍️ We had a great time writing this Spotlight article on one of our favorite topics: how phages interact with each other! 🦠
From cooperation to competition, phage-phage interactions reveal a fascinating layer of microbial life that’s often overlooked.
A piece crafted by the talented Josie Elliott!

Had a great time in Paris at the EMBO workshop on the immune system of bacteria, thank you to all the organisers. Conferences in cool cities are also the perfect opportunities to go to other awesome places like Fontainebleau and try some outdoor bouldering