Samuel G. Huete

Dr. Nadia Benaroudj was my PhD supervisor and she's an amazing scientist and a great person, don't hesitate to apply for her project!! 👇👇👇

🔬PPU 2025 Call for Candidates - Discover the PhD projects

Today's featured projects: 4 Cell Biology & Infection projects and 2 Parasites & Insect Vectors projects

🗓 Applications deadline: October 20, 2025
📍Program starts: October 2026

Discover all projects & apply now: bit.ly/4nlPz8x

Des lauréats de Prix de These, de Poster, de Photo pour #MICROBES2025 qui méritent leurs moment de gloire !
Félicitations à tous et Toutes !

🏆Session Remise des prix poster et des prix de thèse pour lors de cette dernière journée de #Microbes2025.
Félicitations à tous les gagnants et merci aux participants !

Grateful as well to my beloved @pasteur.fr , the scientific home where I spent the last four amazing years doing #Science and #Microbiology!

Very much grateful for having received the #PhDPrize of the @jm-sfm.bsky.social @sfmicrobiologie.bsky.social. I truly feel honoured and I congratulate also my colleagues that participated in the same session: amazing microbiology at the forefront of Science!

#Microbes2025

Delighted to see our paper studying the evolution of plasmids over the last 100 years, now out! Years of work by Adrian Cazares, also Nick Thomson @sangerinstitute.bsky.social - this version much improved over the preprint. Final version should be open access, apols.
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En direct de l'audition du prix de thèse de #Microbe2025, le premier candidat, Samuel Garcia Huete, nous a parlé de l'adaptation évolutive des Leptospira pathogènes au stress oxydatif 🦠

Presenting my PhD work at the #Microbes2025 meeting of the French Society for Microbiology (SFM) for their #AnnualPhDPrize.

Spirochetes forever!

#Science
@pasteur.fr @sfmicrobiologie.bsky.social

AI mirrors experimental science to uncover a mechanism of gene transfer crucial to bacterial evolution By solving a previously unsolved biological question, the AI co-scientist predicted a complex mechanism of gene transfer and generated hypotheses that opened new research directions, illustrating AI's...

Our second paper with @tcostalab.bsky.social and GoogleDeepMind
reports our experience with Google’s co-scientist: remarkably, the AI independently recapitulated our experimental discovery on cf-PICIs, showcasing AI’s potential to accelerate biology.
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Chimeric infective particles expand species boundaries in phage-inducible chromosomal island mobilization Capsid-forming PICIs (cf-PICIs) produce their own capsids and exploit phage tails from unrelated species to transfer their DNA across bacterial hosts. This tail piracy enables broad dissemination and ...

Thrilled to share our two latest papers with the @tcostalab.bsky.social
lab! In the first, we uncover a new mechanism of satellite transfer: cf-PICIs hijack tails from diverse phages to spread across species.
@imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

La blanca orilla. Y mas allá, la inmensa campiña verde, tendida ante un fugaz amanecer.

¿Qué, Gandalf? ¿Qué se ve?

¿El final? No, el viaje no concluye aquí. La muerte es sólo otro sendero, que recorreremos todos. El velo gris de este mundo se levanta y todo se convierte en plateado cristal. Es entonces, cuando se ve...

📣Bruno Sainz from #IIBM @csic.es receives substantial funding in the call for synergistic projects (CAM), together with @serranovillar.bsky.social -Ramón y Cajal Hospital/IRYCIS

➡️Reprogramming The Tumor Microenvironment Through Microbiome-Derived Immunomodulatory Molecules

Congratulations Bruno!!👏

Our latest efforts to understand Enterococcal wound infection. In long-term collaboration with @gthibault.bsky.social, we discovered how E. faecalis makes extracellular ROS - via EET!⚡️Which in turn dysregulates host UPR to delay wound healing. Led by @aarontan.bsky.social - his videos below are 🤩!

But the main question was still unanswered: how would a SOD-deficient pathogen face superoxide toxicity without the enzyme that always does the job?

Well, the answer, if you want it, is in our paper. Go check it out! 😉

👇👇
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

But we like to play: what happens if you return them the gene they lost? What happens if you give them back the SOD gene? Will they become more superoxide resistant? Surprisingly, they didn't!
See our Fig 2!

Evolution always goes first, so we figured that the ancestor of these bacteria had a SOD and that they lost it on their way to becoming pathogens... Interesting, right? Check our Fig. 1 here!
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

So we embarked on a risky adventure: we took one of these SOD-deficient pathogenic aerobes and decided not to leave the enterprise until we had an answer on how these organisms faced oxygen toxicity against all odds
Guess what? This organism was a spirochete: L. interrogans #SpirochetesAreDifferent

An ancient metalloenzyme evolves through metal preference modulation - Nature Ecology & Evolution The iron/manganese superoxide dismutases constitute a family of metalloenzymes that function as scavengers of reactive oxygen species. Here the authors use phylogenetics, biochemistry and structural b...

However, the advent of next-generation sequencing revealed hundreds of microorganisms across all branches of the tree of life that did NOT have any superoxide detoxification system, thus questioning everything again!
See Fig 1 in Sendra et al. Nat Eco Evol (2023)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Isolation of superoxide dismutase mutants in Escherichia coli: is superoxide dismutase necessary for aerobic life? Mu transposons carrying the chloramphenicol resistance marker have been inserted into the cloned Escherichia coli genes sodA and sodB coding for manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) and iron superox...

In 1986, Carlioz & Touati finally proved that SOD-lacking E. coli could not grow in the presence of oxygen unless AAs were added to the media. This closed the debate, and similar observations were reported in yeast and Drosophila.
👇
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

The seminal paper in 1979 by Fridovich & coll. predicted that aerobes must have superoxide detoxification systems, but this was highly controversial for over a decade (see James A Fee papers) until, in 1986, a milestone paper was published.
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Oxygen is toxic for living beings (believe it or not), but recent studies showed that 10% of them do not care much about it. We were convinced there was a missing key piece in this puzzle and, after hard work and countless thinking hours 🤔, we think we have found an answer 👇🧵

My first first-authored paper is now out ahead of print in #mBio. It was a loooong way between journals, but here we are with a result that I believe will be highly relevant for anyone interested in microbiology and evolution! 🦠🧬
👇
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

🎓🧪
Again, publish and review ONLY in society journals so your money gets re-invested in science. And be part of constructing your society's social network!
#mSystems #mBio #ASM #ISME #FEMS
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

A very exciting resource that provides access to all reference proteomes within the Spirochaetes phylum.

(Spirochaetes are spiral-shaped #bacteria causing all kinds of terrible #diseases, including syphilis, yaws, #LymeDisease, and relapsing fever)

#microbiology #biology #science #borrelia

A study done at @pasteur.fr with the support of the Ultrastructural BioImaging Unit, the Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Hub, the Scientific Information Systems and Technical Expertise Division, and very valuable feedback from many colleagues around the world!

Spirochetes unveiled!

Shout-out to the amazing team at Institut Pasteur helping with the data analysis, and interpretation, and all the people who helped us with very valuable feedback!

spirochase.pasteur.cloud