Josh Mattila

Reported Tuberculosis Symptoms: An Inadequate Classifier of Disease State We provide evidence that self-reported symptoms are an inadequate classifier of disease state, heavily influenced by context and substantial interviewer va

We need to think beyond symptom status to classify TB disease, currently we have increasing evidence that symptom reporting is unreliable to assert disease states.

Very happy that i had the privilege to collaborate with this work!
#TBsky #IDsky
academic.oup.com/cid/article/...

Benedikt Pleyer/Nomadic Nostoc filmed these tiny ostracods collected from the beach of a Japanese island.

Vargula hilgendorfii live in marine sand & emit a mix of luciferase & luciferin that lights up to deter predators.

The same chemicals produce firefly glow.

海蛍: umihotaru = "Sea fireflies"

We have a PhD project as part of this scheme focused on mathematical modelling of STI transmission. Do get in touch if you are interested.

Single-cell atlas reveals alveolar macrophage-specific Oncostatin-M drives pulmonary fibrosis via fibroblast activation in PCV2d infection https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.08.692949v1

Decreased cytoplasmic crowding via inhibition of ribosome biogenesis can trigger Candida albicans filamentous growth Nature Microbiology - During filamentous growth in the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans, a reduction in ribosome concentration leads to a decrease in macromolecular crowding. Inhibition of...

👉Excited to share our latest work @natmicrobiol.nature.com, revealing a decrease in cytoplasmic crowding during filamentous growth in the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans. Furthermore we found that inhibition of ribosome biogenesis can trigger filamentous growth in this pathogen
rdcu.be/eT1Su

We’re excited to announce the opening of the Geneva Expansion Microscopy Facility (GenExM)!

GenExM is a full-service U-ExM platform (U-ExM, Cryo-ExM, iU-ExM), delivering nanoscale imaging.

Led by Dr. Olivier Mercey, GenExM welcomes academic & industrial collaborations.

👉 www.unige.ch/genexm/

Are there any two people who appear to be better fits for each other than Kid Rock and Lauren Boebert?

It's happening! Canada launched two programs to recruit international researchers.

Canada Impact+ Research Chairs (1 million/yr for 8 yrs +)
Canada Impact+ Emerging Leaders.

I will do my best to facilitate the process for those interested. Hit me up.

www.canada.ca/en/impact-pl...

Image shows a network of circular nodes joined by lines. The central node says PhD training. The surrounding nodes list different careers, including government, education, publishing, applied research, NGOs and industry.

The traditional pipeline view of academia no longer reflects the reality of scientific #careers. In this Perspective, Alexandra A-T Weber @eawag.bsky.social reframes success as a network of paths that recognizes excellence in its many forms 🧪 #AcademicSky plos.io/4pSgzx5

These people are clowns with flamethrower intent on burning down our public health infrastructure

Covid vaccines safe four years on, first long-term study suggests Covid vaccines safe four years on, first long-term study suggests Getting the Pfizer or Moderna Covid vaccine in 2021 did not increase overall risk of death in the next four years compared

Yet another study (French) shows that Pfizer/Moderna vaccines are safe and save lives.
A study of 28 mil people over 4 yrs shows that 75% of vaccinated people had a lower risk of dying from severe Covid.
🧪 www.scimex.org/newsfeed/cov...

Essential redundancies fuel Mycobacterium tuberculosis adaptation to the host Redundancy in biology is, at a glance, counterintuitive because if the function of two gene products completely overlaps then, throughout the course of evolution, one of the genes will likely accumula...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is an outlier in many ways. One of them is keeping a high degree of functional redundancy despite its obligate pathogen lifestyle. In this review, we reflect on the biological meaning of M. tuberculosis functional redundancies.

journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

This is like Mr Rogers picking up Mjolnir

A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen

Human-to-Human Rabies Transmission via Solid Organ... This report describes the public health response to a patient who died after transplantation with an organ from a donor with undiagnosed rabies.

Human-to-Human Rabies Transmission via Solid Organ Transplantation from a Donor with Undiagnosed Rabies — United States, October 2024–February 2025
MMWR

A man died of donor-derived rabies after receiving a kidney transplant from a donor scratched by a skunk.

www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes... #TxID

Lol, not even getting the likes on his post that an average Twitter troll gets with a mediocre tweet. Good luck monetizing that post even enough to buy another subway fare.

Please RT. Post-doc opportunity alert! 💥 closing soon 10th December.. Come join our team (www.thelowlab.org) at Imperial, London, working on the structure and mechanism of bacterial secretion systems.

For more details and to apply please see

www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

CDC panel recommends delaying birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine The CDC's ACIP panel voted to recommend delaying the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine, ending a policy that has reined in the virus.

This regressive move will literally kill people. It's making kids' liver cancer great again. And it's a sign of more harm to come.

CDC panel recommends delaying birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine www.statnews.com/2025/12/05/c... via @statnews.com

~40% of Hepatitis B infections are caught in childhood. It is contagious enough that it can be spread just from sharing common household objects.

The chance of chronic infection (ie does not clear, and is associated with high rates of liver failure and cancer) ranges from 50%-90% in this age group.

Hey friends. I’m looking for a postdoc interested in studying host-pathogen interactions and immunology of tuberculosis. Send me some good people! We have a great group here! Email me joanne@pitt.edu. Thanks!

How an arthropod-borne virus manages host switches: exploration of host-specific mutations and gene formula in bluetongue virus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.04.692277v1

Maturation of human intestinal epithelial cell layers fortifies the apical surface against Salmonella attack van Rijn and Lopes et al. present a resource for live-cell imaging of bacterial infection dynamics atop human enteroid- and colonoid-derived intestinal epithelia, exhibiting varying maturation levels and in the presence or absence of soluble mucus production. Application of this resource reveals how absorptive epithelium maturation fortifies the surface against enterobacterial attack.

Maturation of human intestinal epithelial cell layers fortifies the apical surface against Salmonella attack

Figure showing the interactive segmentation refinement in Toggle-Untoggle – de-selection, merging and manual annotation.

In their Tools and Resources article, Nina Grishchenko, Michael Olson and colleagues present Toogle-Untoogle, a cell segmentation tool with an interactive user verification interface.
journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine (Gift Article) A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

An important write up from the NYT on the funding changes at the NIH.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I'm more concerned about his inability to figure out which part of his body was scanned than the scan results themselves.

70 years ago today, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama.

Graphical abstract for the paper. Tick feeding causes the up-regulation of CCR7 and CXCR4 on human epidermal LCs, which are polarized by tick saliva and emigrate to the lymphatics to mediate immune tolerance. Consequently, tolerogenic T cell priming and lack of effector T cell differentiation results in an inappropriate T cell response to tick-borne pathogens.

"tick bites and tick saliva reprogram Langerhans cells, (which) dampens protective immunity and helps explain how ticks and their pathogens evade host defense and achieve efficient transmission"

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

#MicroSky

It’s useful to think about things like this in numbers of tenure track professors.

$33M is 358 assistant professors. Or about fourteen percent of the total number of full-time faculty at Michigan State.

Postdoctoral Researcher positions-Kapahi lab - Buck Institute - Career Page The Kapahi lab seeks postdocs to lead innovative projects exploring how circadian clocks & nutrient-responsive pathways influence eye & neuronal degeneration.

🚀 Postdoc opportunity!

The Kapahi Lab at Buck Institute for Research on Aging is hiring two postdoctoral researchers to lead cutting-edge studies on how nutrient signaling and circadian rhythms influence neurodegeneration & aging — combining fly, worm, and mammalian models with genomics. 📈

👉