Eachan Johnson

How phototherapy could reverse antibiotic resistance Lars Stevens-Cullinane works in a dark room. But he's not processing negatives and printing photographs on light-sensitive paper; he's testing whether brief flashes of light can make drug-resistant bacteria sensitive to antibiotics.

Light-activated metal complexes have been shown to disable antibiotic resistance enzymes in E. coli, significantly enhancing the effectiveness of existing antibiotics without harming human cells. doi.org/hbcxrb

📣 Paper alert!

I am delighted that our paper exploring the impact of Neanderthal-derived variants on the activity of a disease-associated craniofacial enhancer has been published in Development today!
journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

🚨Deadline for our Senior Scientist applications is next week.

If you want to develop your academic career in London and help us tackle next-generation drug discovery for Gram-negative infections, apply!

Crick group leaders work across disciplines, supported by core funding and mentoring to build ambitious, curiosity-driven research.

Apply now to join us ➡️ www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

Doctoral clinical fellows The Crick's clinical PhD programme.

Just a few weeks left to apply for our clinical PhD programme.

We're looking for clinicians who are passionate about research to join the 3-year fully funded programme.

Learn more and see what positions are available ⬇️

www.crick.ac.uk/careers-and-...

📢 We're searching for a PhD-level Senior Research Scientist to develop a next-generation antibacterial drug discovery strategy for Gram-negative infections.

If you're looking to combine CRISPRi and high-throughput assays, reach out to me by email or apply below.

www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43...

Join our community of more than 120 ambitious research programmes in infectious disease, chemical biology, and many other areas of biomedicine - all under one roof with fantastic facilities and support.

We are inviting applications for postdoctoral fellows in immunology of TB at the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative, University of Cape Town. For more information see the attached ad:

idm.uct.ac.za/media/739223

Dear #microbiology and #immunology community- I took a break from social media after I deleted my Twitter account, but am back here. Please help me rebuild my community by following me and amplifying this message- I will follow you back. Thank you and I look forward to our many interactions!

The NIH ordered me to stop my ‘dangerous’ gain-of-function research. It isn’t dangerous at all Safe gain-of-function research is necessary to identify new treatments for diseases like for tuberculosis — but the NIH has imposed unfounded stops.

Important piece from Sarah Stanley at Berkeley on new NIH definitions that can be construed to arbitrarily halt research that is both safe and important to public health and future cures www.statnews.com/2025/10/06/g... via @statnews.com

Proteome-Wide Target Identification Using Reactive Metallo-Scaffolds (r-mS): A Platform for Metallodrug Discovery Metal complexes offer unique opportunities as scaffolds in chemical biology and drug discovery, with tuneable geometry, modular coordination environments, and structural features not readily accessibl...

🧪 Excited to share our new work on reactive metallo-scaffolds (r-mS)! We combine metal complexes with chemoproteomics to discover new liganding sites across the proteome! Shout out to a great collaboration with GSK! Fantastic team effort 🫶🏻 chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

📆 Deadline: 14 November.
🩺 Doctoral Clinical Fellows programme (3-year PhD)
🤝 Exciting collaboration with the amazing @jeanninehess.bsky.social
Curating bioactive chemical space in pathogenic bacteria using accumulation signatures across species
✍️ Apply here: www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

📆 Deadline: 5 November.
Charting an atlas of bioactive chemical space in pathogenic bacteria
How can we computationally design experiments to more quickly discover new chemical probes and antibiotics?
✍️ Apply here: www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

PhD students Our PhD programme attracts the brightest scientific minds and is an opportunity for talented people to embark on their career in biomedical research.

📢 PhD Opportunity @crick.ac.uk

Want to help fight against antimicrobial resistance? Join us in London! Open to international applicants.

We have non-clinical & clinical PhD positions to accelerate antibiotic discovery across bacterial species.

November deadlines. More details ⬇️🧵

The human ribosome modulates multidomain protein biogenesis by delaying cotranslational domain docking - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology By studying dynamic folding intermediates on the human ribosome, Pellowe et al. show that newly made domains help each other to fold but do not stably interact until synthesis is complete, avoiding in...

Our article on human multidomain protein biogenesis is now published in @natsmb.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Development does not happen in isolation! Material properties, geometry, stiffness, fluid flows...can all steer how development unfolds. If you’re exploring these kinds of questions, we’d love to see your work @dev-journal.bsky.social
More info below ⬇️

Mining the CD4 antigen repertoire for next-generation tuberculosis vaccines Systematic antigen selection is an enduring challenge in tuberculosis (TB) vaccine development. An antigen screen ranks protective CD4 T cell antigens and yields a novel trivalent mRNA vaccine that protects against TB challenges in mice.

Now online! Mining the CD4 antigen repertoire for next-generation tuberculosis vaccines

Be my colleague! Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is hiring two tenure-track positions for Fall 2026, chemical education and coatings technology.

Chen Ed: jobs.calpoly.edu/en-us/job/55...

Coatings: jobs.calpoly.edu/en-us/job/55...

The EMBL PhD programme is open until 13th October (entry ~Sep 2026):
www.embl.org/about/info/e...

We have three positions in microbial genomics at EMBL-EBI, including one in my group. Please do apply, or if you know anyone that would be interested pass on to them

Faculty Recruitment

Please apply to our tenure-track faculty position at
@stanford-chemh.bsky.social! We are searching for a new colleague working at the interface between computation and molecular sciences. See post below and pls forward widely!
chemh.stanford.edu/opportunitie...

Welcome back! It will be good to have you on this side of the pond.

My institution is looking to hire a new microbiologist: apply.interfolio.com/173702. Please share, and let me know if you have any questions about the position or UTA.

Global, regional, and national estimates of tuberculosis incidence averted by eliminating undernutrition in adults: a modelling study Background Current efforts to reduce global tuberculosis incidence have proved insufficient, highlighting that urgent action is needed to address underlying modifiable risk factors such as undernutrit...

So...what would happen to the global TB epidemic if we hypothetically "eliminated" undernutrition? In this preprint, we combined estimates from our new review (doi.org/10.1093/ije/...) with population-specific BMI distributions to find out...(doi.org/10.1101/2025...)

How to make training data from tacit knowledge in medicinal chemistry is one of the big challenges.

Discovery of a widespread chemical signalling pathway in the Bacteroidota - Nature The N-acyl-cyclolysine system regulates the expression of co-localized operons encoding diverse secreted molecules in Bacteroidota.

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

#microsky

Monitoring single cell bioenergetic status and cell lysis in dense and differentiating Bacillus subtilis cultures Bacillus subtilis is a major model organism for studying population heterogeneity in clonal bacterial cultures due to its high genetic tractability and ability to differentiate into subpopulations wit...

A new methods paper from us, this time with a focus on reliable monitoring membrane potential and cell lysis at different growth stages and cell densities. Also, note the surprisingly high level of background lysis in seemingly healthy B. subtilis cultures.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Targeted CRISPR screens reveal genes essential for Cryptosporidium survival in the host intestine - Nature Communications Cryptosporidium is an important threat to public health, yet it lacks a robust genetic toolkit. Here, Watson et al. introduce a targeted CRISPR-based screening method to identify parasite genes that a...

Now available in a polished format! An important step toward accelerated functional genomics for the Cryptosporidium parasite. Brought to you by the incomparable @lucy-watson.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My Friday night hot take is that replication studies are largely a waste of time & $

If a result is worth following up on, it's better to address from a different angle & see if it holds water. Strong ideas withstand this

Conversely, there R infinite ways a replication can fail that teach you zip

🚨 Looking for a new research opportunity?🚨 | Louise Walport 🚨 Looking for a new research opportunity?🚨 We are looking to recruit two talented postdocs to join our group based at the Molecular Science Research Hub at Imperial College London: - Both to join ou...

Are you excited about using cyclic #peptides in #DrugDiscovery?

Here is a great opportunity to perform a #postdoc with a great mentor in the group of @ljwalport.bsky.social at @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social!

www.linkedin.com/posts/louise...

#ChemBio #Chemistry #ChemSky

Identification of gut bacteria reductases that biotransform steroid hormones - Nature Communications Here, the authors identify and characterize three gut bacterial enzyme families that metabolize endogenous and synthetic steroid hormones, showing to act on diverse substrates, to exhibit gene fusions...

Interesting work on characterizing steroid-modifying enzymes in commensal gut bacteria:

"Identification of gut bacteria reductases that biotransform steroid hormones" www.nature.com/articles/s41...