Nicholas Gervais

Excellent news - we desperately need more antifungal drugs. Onto the reading list this goes! #microsky 🧪

Since both believed to some extent in inheritance of acquired traits, the fundamental difference between Lamarck and Darwin (aside from mechanism, natural selection vs use and disuse) is that Lamarck believed in the power of Life and Darwin believed in the power of Death

Well said!

Screenshot of story headline

FDA approves new non-opioid pain drug tinyurl.com/3zxb6vrd
The FDA has approved Vertex’s suzetrigine, an oral inhibitor of the ion channel NaV1.8, for the treatment of moderate to severe acute pain, providing a much-needed new option. Read more about the history of the drug here tinyurl.com/5x7zyduj

Chromosomal capture of beneficial genes drives plasmids towards ecological redundancy Plasmids are a ubiquitous feature of bacterial genomes, but the evolutionary forces driving genes to become associated with plasmids are poorly understood. To address this problem, we compared the fit...

New pre-print!!! What types of genes end up on plasmids and why? The take home message of this paper is that beneficial genes move from plasmids to chromosome, causing the ecological value of plasmids to decay over time.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our global study on the state of trust in scientists is now out in Nature Human Behaviour! 🥳

With a team of 241 researchers, we surveyed 71,922 people in 68 countries, providing the largest dataset on trust in scientists post-pandemic 👇🧵https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02090-5

This is great. Hope this format makes its way to other Nature journals (and can be open-access...)

E. coli prepares for starvation by dramatically remodeling its proteome in the first hours after loss of nutrients It is widely believed that due to nutrient limitations in natural environments, bacteria spend most of their life in non-growing states. However, very little is known about how bacteria change their p...

What do bacterial cells do when they run out of nutrients? Although most bacterial studies focus on cells in exponentially growing states, in the wild bacteria likely spend most of their time slowly starving to death. 1/n
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

When I started my PhD 6 years ago, this sticker on my office door got me excited. Sure! let's "CRISPR Candida auris"! Today I am excited to show that that's not as easy as it sounds! 😉 Read our latest preprint on the challenges with editing C. auris: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Extremely validating. I’ll never complain about C. albicans again after working with CRISPR in C. auris

Happy New Year, blue-sci-peeps!

My piece in Annual Review of Biophysics on chromatin replication is now available online.

doi.org/10.1146/annu...

If you have paywall issues, try this link:

madhanilab.ucsf.edu/s/annurev-bi...

🎇🎄Some holiday reading: Overdue TWEETORIAL on the latest preprint from our lab 🎇🎄

In this work, superstar postdoc @xinhexue.bsky.social combined 2 kinds of pooled CRISPR screens to pinpoint noncoding regulatory elements and the transcription factors that activate these elements.

Can't wait for this new meeting on drug resistance and tolerance across species and diseases. A principle revealed in one system – maybe using different terminology – could be the big new idea when imported to another!
Abstract deadline in January!
s.embl.org/ees25-01 @EMBO/@embl.org

Looks amazing. Thanks for sharing