Brian Stevenson Ph.D. spirochete lab

Drawing of a large and small bacteria, with a heart shape between, representing me and my daughter

“Daddy & Daughter Bacteria”
Dry erase marker artwork by my then-nine year-old daughter, on my office white board. Still there, and always will be.
#MicroSky

With you!

Looking forward to catching up in Chicago!

"Ahern had no relevant disclosures"
versus
"Holly Ahern, MS, MT, the chief scientific officer of ACES Diagnostics, the company developing LymeSeek"
🤔

I look forward to seeing the data, not just a press release

Interesting report on Yersinia pestis evolution
#MicroSky

Wigglesworthia glossinidia
both an intriguing name and lifestyle: it is an endosymbiont of the tsetse fly
has one of the smallest genomes of any living organism

I will miss this year, but hope to be there in ‘26 (NIH willing 🤞)

For patients who have/had a tick-borne disease

TardiDoc figurine on a bright red hollyhock flower

TardiDoc on a Hollyhock
Prince Edward Island
#TardiDocTravels
@markowenmartin.bsky.social

Figure from the preprint, on variations in chromosome sequences

Telomere-to-telomere assembly detects genomic diversity in Canadian strains of Borrelia burgdorferi

diversity & conservation among Lyme spirochetes, including the curious DNA chunk that is sometimes on the chromosome, other times a separate linear plasmid

#MicroSky

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

Our condolences to you and your family and community.

It has taken medical science 200 years to advance humans to the point where people are so healthy and living so long that they can deny that science and medicine is what got us here.

#MicroSky

TardiDoc figurine at the house from “Anne of Green Gables “

TardiDoc of Green Gables
Cavendish (“Avonlea”), Prince Edward Island
#TardiDocTravels
@markowenmartin.bsky.social

Characterization and genomic analysis of the Lyme disease spirochete bacteriophage ϕBB-1 Lyme disease is a tick-borne infection caused by the spirochete Borrelia (Borreliella) burgdorferi. Borrelia species have highly fragmented genomes composed of a linear chromosome and a constellation ...

Recently, @prsecor.bsky.social found that bacteriophages of B burgdorferi package pieces of all the genome, including pieces of linear plasmids. Sequencing phage populations provided sequences of the linear plasmids’ telomeres!
#MicroSky

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Linear plasmids of Borrelia burgdorferi have a telomeric structure and sequence similar to those of a eukaryotic virus - PubMed Spirochetes of the genus Borrelia have double-stranded linear plasmids with covalently closed ends. The physical nature of the terminal connections was determined for the 16-kb linear plasmid of the B...

Borrelia burgdorferi has linear plasmids with hairpin loops. The first of those sequences were closed using chemical DNA sequencing methods.
#MicroSky

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1938918/

TardiDoc figure on a dock on a lake

Lake in Maine

TardiDoc is swimming, boating, and fishing in the Maine woods
@markowenmartin.bsky.social

#MicroSky

R21 was reviewed June 9. Scored 30. Received pink sheets last Friday. Revised proposal submitted this morning. Really appreciate those extra 2 weeks for serving on a study section!

I submitted 4 applications to NIH this cycle. 2 new, 2 resubmissions, with 2 as PI & 2 as Co-PI
Many of us are going to be screwed over by this new policy

Yeah, but the 6 submissions means an average of only 2 submissions/resubmissions per cycle.
Glad that I am near the end of my academic career. This past 6 months has been hell for new faculty, and its only going to get worse

I submitted 4 applications to NIH this cycle (2 new, 2 resubmissions). I am currently operating on a single R21, and can't afford to sit on my ass and hope that 1 or 2 submissions a year will bring in money to keep my students in grad school

Funding is hard to come by, especially now. I submitted 4 proposals to NIH this cycle (2 new, 2 resubmissions). There are no benefits to telling scientists to not come up with new ideas

I submitted 4 proposals this cycle (2 new, 2 resubmissions)

Most important part of this announcement:
NIH will only accept six new, renewal, resubmission, or revision applications from an individual Principal Investigator/Program Director or Multiple Principal Investigator for all council rounds in a calendar year.

New NIH policy announced today:
NIH will only accept six new, renewal, resubmission, or revision applications from an individual Principal Investigator/Program Director or Multiple Principal Investigator for all council rounds in a calendar year.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

In the Victorian age, there was an enormous interest in all aspects of science ("natural philosophy"), from the poorest classes to the rich. Magazines sprang up to disseminate all kinds of knowledge between those amateurs, including "Nature". It evolved into a highbrow journal in the 20th century.

Figure 1 from the paper: Hypothetical development of anti-B. burgdorferi antibody as Lyme disease progresses from early to late stage. Legend: APC, antigen presenting cell; DC, dendritic cell; NK, natural killer cell; Ig, immunoglobulin; EM, erythema migrans; B. b. inf, Borrelia burgdorferi infection.

Class and isotype of VlsE-specific antibody differentiates Lyme disease stage

Exciting new work from Nisha Nair, Adriana Marques, Liz Horn, Grant Brown, and Maria Gomes-Solecki
@gomes-solecki.bsky.social

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40662763/

#MicroSky

Machine Learning-Driven Identification of Virulence Determinants in Borrelia burgdorferi Associated with Human Dissemination Lyme disease, the most common tick-born infectious diseases in the United States, presents with highly variable clinical outcomes, ranging from localized erythema migrans to severe disseminated compli...

Machine Learning-Driven Identification of Virulence Determinants in Borrelia burgdorferi Associated with Human Dissemination

new preprint from Hoa T. Nguyen and Catherine A. Brissette
@brissettelab.bsky.social

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

#MicroSky