Kranzusch Lab

"Jane Goodall showed us what a life in science could look like: rigorous discovery paired with fierce advocacy for what you study. She gave the world six decades of groundbreaking research on chimpanzees and their habitats, then turned that knowledge into a global movement for conservation." (1/2)

My pleasure @erinedoherty.bsky.social and @benmorehouse.bsky.social - for me this was the stand-out discovery of the last year in the field

Giant DNA viruses encode a hallmark translation initiation complex of eukaryotic life In contrast to living organisms, viruses were long thought to lack protein synthesis machinery and instead depend on host factors to translate viral transcripts. Here, we discover that giant DNA virus...

Are viruses capable of regulating protein synthesis in the nuanced way of cellular organisms? Kinda! I’m excited to share some of my postdoc work that leveraged giant DNA viruses to address this question.

A miniature CRISPR–Cas10 enzyme confers immunity by inhibitory signalling - Nature Panoptes, an anti-phage defence system against virus-mediated immune suppression, is revealed.

Today in @nature.com , we highlight how a cousin of CRISPR-Cas10, mCpol, establishes an evolutionary trap in anti-phage immune systems.

Check out @erinedoherty.bsky.social and my work from @doudna-lab.bsky.social lab here:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Panoptes system uses decoy cyclic nucleotides to defend against phage - Nature The Panoptes antiphage system defends bacteria by detecting phage-encoded counter-defences that sequester cyclic nucleotide signals, triggering membrane disruption and highlighting a broader strategy of sensing immune evasion through second-messenger surveillance.

Our story describing the Panoptes bacterial immune defense system is now finally peer-reviewed and published today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Genome-resolved metagenomics reveals microbiome diversity across 48 tick species - Nature Microbiology Sequencing the genome and microbiome of about 1,500 tick samples from regions across China revealed host–microbe associations in ticks that could have implications for controlling ticks and tick-borne diseases.

"Tick–pathogen–microbiome interactions based on #hologenome-wide analysis" from 16,000 ticks, 48 species, and 8 genera. 👀

Nutritional endosymbionts are prevalent with a new 7,783 bacterial genomes from 1,373 bacterial species. @holobiontbiology.bsky.social

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

>18,000 new genomes of giant DNA viruses! An incredible trove of new genes and insights into evolution of host-virus interactions from @fmschu.bsky.social and @jgi.doe.gov

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Protein Domain Designer tool for the generation of publication-ready protein domain diagrams

New week, new tool: Find our Protein Domain Designer tool to generate publication-ready protein domain diagrams here: domaindesigner.farnunglab.com

@science.org Deazaguanylation is a nucleobase-protein conjugation required for type IV CBASS #immunity | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... ❄️🔬🧬🦠🧫

Discovery of functional NLRs using expression level, high-throughput transformation and large-scale phenotyping Nature Plants - Rapid discovery of functional resistance genes is enabled by a high-expression signature and high-throughput transformation. This approach identified 31 new resistance genes for...

Super excited to see our work on the NLRseek program finally published 🥳 Here we identify new NLRs against major wheat pathogens and present a pipeline for NLR identification. Huge thank you to all of the co-authors for bringing this work together! @matthewmoscou.bsky.social rdcu.be/eIGvv

What an amazing accomplishment of my colleague/lab neighbor Andrea Ablasser & her team => Citation Laureate on their incredible work on the cGAS-STING pathway together w/ Zhijian ‘James’ Chen & Glen Barber. Big congrats 🥳!!

clarivate.com/citation-lau...

Doug Wassarman of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

New research published in @science.org led by @danafarber.bsky.social’s Doug Wassarman and @kranzuschlab.bsky.social reveals new protein chemistry named deazaguanylation that controls activation of immunity.

Read more: bit.ly/3WeKsLb

I am excited to share our new preprint on the CAGE complex, a mysterious hollow protein complex that I first saw years ago while surveying Tetrahymena ciliary lysate www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #cilia #protistsonsky 🧬🧪

C. elegans is a real animal and we set out to understand how it comes to have its distinctive biogeography. Its ancestral center of diversity is in the higher elevation forests of Hawaii. Its closest relatives are spread across east Asia. Did they travel from Asia? [Preprint 🧵]

NDG is the initial step in our model of a new form of protein conjugation chemistry. Preprints from Doug + Angela Gao and the Bae lab also link NDG to QatABCD defense, highlighting further roles for Q biosynthetic enzymes in immunity

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In phage defense, an N-terminal glycine residue in the substrate protein takes the place of ammonia in canonical Q biosynthetic chemistry to create a protein-nucleobase conjugation modification named N-terminal deazaguanylation or NDG

Why defense islands would encode nucleobase biosynthetic machinery was a mystery. We searched in vain for modified nucleotides as signals in CBASS defense… until Doug surprisingly discovered a Q-like base directly conjugated to the N-terminus of a substrate protein!

In addition to ACGU, "Q" is a modified nucleobase required for tRNA maturation in bacteria, plants, and animals. Since 2020, type IV CBASS phage defense islands were known to encode proteins with homology to the enzymes QueC (Q modification) and TGT (Q installation)

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

You’ve heard of ubiquitination, meet deazaguanylation: Doug Wassarman in our lab discovered phage defense pathways have co-opted Q nucleobase biosynthetic enzymes to catalyze a new form of protein conjugation chemistry @science.org

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Announcement: Medical Microbiology & Immunology Seminar Series, September 26, 12:00 pm, MSB 1520. "The Evolution of Immunity and Pathogenesis within Environmental Microbial Battlegrounds". Dr. Tera Levin, University of Pittsburgh.

Join us on Friday at noon for a great seminar from Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social! @uwmadisonmmi.bsky.social

The mechanism of STING NF-κB signaling has remained a mystery. An exciting new study from the Paludan lab now uses data throughout animal STING evolution to provide new answers – including isolating white blood cells from turtles and carp!

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

GPU-accelerated homology search with MMseqs2 - Nature Methods Graphics processing unit-accelerated MMseqs2 offers tremendous speedups for homology retrieval from metagenomic databases, query-centered multiple sequence alignment generation for structure predictio...

MMseqs2-GPU sets new standards in single query search speed, allows near instant search of big databases, scales to multiple GPUs and is fast beyond VRAM. It enables ColabFold MSA generation in seconds and sub-second Foldseek search against AFDB50. 1/n
📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
💿 mmseqs.com

Cell death plays important roles in antiviral immunity across all kingdoms of life. Great panel discussion in @natsmb.nature.com from leading experts in the field highlight open mysteries in how and why cell death functions:

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

Naiavirus: an enveloped giant virus with a pleomorphic, flexible tail - Nature Communications Rodrigues and Queiroz et al. report the discovery of Naiavirus, the largest enveloped virus, isolated from a Brazil biome. With an oval capsid and flexible tail, its giant genome holds many novel gene...

Naiavirus: an enveloped giant virus with a pleomorphic, flexible tail
nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63463-6

My first first-author paper is out!🎉
Here we propose a model where a silencing complex, PIWI*, assembles on target RNAs to recruit effectors and shut down transposon activity.
Huge thanks to the Brennecke and Plaschka labs, especially Julius and Clemens, and all co-authors!

Presence of group II introns in phage genomes Abstract. Although bacteriophage genomes are under strong selective pressure for high coding density, they are still frequently invaded by mobile genetic e

Splicing in phage and jumbophage genomes!

Great discovery pipeline and new paper from Liana Merk and @cryptogenomicon.bsky.social highlights wide-spread use of Group II introns in phages:

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

YprA family helicases provide the missing link between diverse prokaryotic immune systems https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.15.676423v1

Constraints on chromosome evolution revealed by the 229 chromosome pairs of the Atlas blue butterfly The genome of the Atlas blue butterfly contains ten times more chromosomes than most butterflies, and more than any other known diploid animal. Wright et al. show that this extraordinary karyotype is ...

How many chromosomes can an animal have?

In our paper out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social we show that the Atlas blue butterfly has 229 chromosome pairs- the highest in diploid Metazoa! These arose by rapid autosome fragmentation while sex chromosomes stayed intact.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Conference on Bacteriophages: Biology, Dynamics, and Therapeutics - IAS-USA Physical Education: Bridging Clinical Research and Patient Care

Don’t miss the inaugural Conference on Bacteriophages: Biology, Dynamics, and Therapeutics, October 12–14, 2025, in Washington, DC. A 2.5-day program of invited talks, symposia, workshops, and abstracts will highlight the latest advances. For more info: bit.ly/3JUKLYL

When predators meet the matrix: Natural resistance via amyloid fibers How do bacteria protect themselves against predators? In a recent issue of Nature, Ledvina et al. reveal curli fibers as a genetically encoded defense against Bdellovibrio predation in wild E. coli st...

I wrote a Preview in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social !
A new study suggests that #curli may protect prey from bacterial predators like #Bdellovibrio.

Really looking forward to seeing this model confirmed with live-cell imaging and specific reporters!

www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...