Gerrich

Exaptation — a shift in the function of a trait during evolution —is a basic evolutionary biology concept.

Photo of a damselfly in front of a dew drop on a horsetail.

Photo of a damselfly touching its eye to a dew drop on a horsetail plant.

Photo of a damselfly drinking a dew drop. The damselfly is holding onto a horsetail plant.

This series shows how a damselfly reaches a dewdrop on a horsetail stem, turns its head, touches its eye to the drop, and brings it onto its face for a drink.

There's a software engineer in Hong Kong who makes incredibly detailed scientific diagrams for wikipedia, like this clickable metro-style map of metabolic pathways!!!

A couple new #PhD opportunities to join my lab at the intersection of #synbio, #plantsci and #biotech as part of the Plant BioDesign doctoral programme spanning the University of York, University of Cambridge, University of Bristol and John Innes Centre. 1/4

The Menopause Cliff: What a Million Women's Lab Tests Reveal TLDR: A massive study of 300+ million lab tests from 1+ million women just proved what women have been saying for years: menopause isn't a gradual slope—it's a physiological cliff. Nearly e

We analyzed changes in physiology relative to menopause using two large scale studies that include millions of lab tests. Rather than align by age, we used statistical inference to align tests to final menstrual period. (1/2)
arunamed.com/the-menopaus...

#openposition #directorposition #hiring #bioprocessengineering #biosystems #syntheticbiology #biotechnology | Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐍𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫 at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems, Magdeburg, Germany The MPI for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems expects...

We have got an open position for a Max Planck Director in the field of Systems Biology and Bioengineering.

There is no more comfortable position.

Please nominate qualified candidates, you can also nominate yourself!

#microsky 🧪

A synthetic bacterium that degrades and assimilates poly(ethylene terephthalate) Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is the fourth most commonly used plastic worldwide. Like all plastics, post-consumer PET is poorly managed and accumulates in the environment, posing significant ecolo...

Paper alert!
We have created a bacterium that eats plastic! We named it PETBuster! Great work by PhD student Dekel Freund @dekel-freund.bsky.social.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A poster with branding for the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre fo Virus Research, labelled 'Virus Snowflakes.' The poster shows snowflake-like virus designs and song lyrics reading: On the twelfth day of Christmas, a virus gave to me, Twelve fights worth winning, Eleven Christmas dinners, Ten lunar landers, Nine childhood vaccines, Eight tools for teaching, Seven dogs a-barking, Six wasps a-laying, FIIIIVE TIIINY RIIIIIIINGS, Four vaccine platforms, Three genome segments, Two twinned capsids, and A world that is too small to see

Feeling festive?
Why not deck the halls with @cvrinfo.bsky.social's papercraft #VirusSnowflakes and celebrate the science of viruses and the fight against viral diseases.
Download for free: cvr-engagement.co.uk/virus-snowfl...
#scicomm #sciart #decorations

Avian-origin influenza A viruses tolerate elevated pyrexic temperatures in mammals Host body temperature can define a virus’s replicative profile—influenza A viruses (IAVs) adapted to 40° to 42°C in birds are less temperature sensitive in vitro compared with human isolates adapted t...

How does fever work?

Our new Science paper shows how elevated body temperature can protect against severe influenza and that avian-origin viruses escape this defence.

This is likely one reason why bird flus and some pandemic influenzas can be so severe.🧵

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

I am very excited to announce that a fully funded PhD position is available in my group.

Topic: Synergistic coevolution in mono-specific and multi-species microbial consortia

Please RT or forward this information to interested candidates.

Deadline: 11.01.26

More info:

shorturl.at/f1TuF

We examined ~4,600 FtsZ sequences and found that charge segregation in the disordered CTL appears to correlate with cell width across species: FtsZ from wider bacteria tends to have more uniform charge distribution in the linker, whereas high charge segregation is mostly found in skinny cells.

💥CONTAM CALENDAR GIVEAWAY💥

Here's your chance to win a ContamCalendar 2026! 🗓️🍄🦠

Just follow @contamclub.bsky.social and repost this post to enter the competition

Winner will be randomly selected from Bluesky or Twitter on Wednesday @ 6pm UTC

Modular in vivo engineering of the reductive methylaspartate cycles for synthetic CO2 fixation Biological carbon fixation is currently limited to seven naturally occurring pathways. Synthetic carbon fixation pathways have the potential to surpass aerobic natural pathways in efficiency, but none...

Newest preprint from our lab: a new family of promising synthetic CO2 fixation cycles that may outcompete the Calvin cycle and that Vittorio Rainaldi realized to a great extent in E. coli! Up to 11 heterologous enzymes in a cascade supporting CO2 fixation & growth! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

‼️🚨🗓️ CONTAMCALENDAR 2026 🗓️🚨‼️

Excited to say the ContamCalendar is back for its fifth edition! We’ve created a fresh new design, folding out for an A3 monthly spread. It’s our best yet, we hope you’ll love it 🗓️🦠🧫🍄

Get yours here ➡️ www.contam.club ⬅️

After 10 Fridays, 10 flowers, and 100+ drawings, the Florédex is complete! ✨

Come take a tour of the design and science behind 10 iconic flowers 🌺🧵

✨Opportunity to join the 🦁🦠 Predatory Bacteria lab!

My lab will move to University of Bern (CH) in April 2026 based on my #ERCStG.
Therefore, we are looking for:
-a PhD student (shorturl.at/mt0LR)
-a 50% Technical Assistant/Lab manager (shorturl.at/0IIKe)

🙏Thanks for sharing.
#MicroSky

Ten days left to apply to be a @crick.ac.uk Early Career Group Leader

Closing date 27th November

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

I'm assembling a denovo genome of a new pseudomonadota (ONT r10), and barrnap is consistently unable to resolve the 5S site(s) from what should be a fully circularized and decently polished output. Based on the 16S and 23S hits there should at least be 3 5S.

What could be happening here? 🤔

🧫🦠

📢 Our Dept. of Systems Biology at Columbia University has an open tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the broad area of quantitative biology. Come join our awesome department in NYC! Please circulate.
apply.interfolio.com/177622
Suggested deadline: 12/15/2025.
@columbiasysbio.bsky.social

Very happy to share our recent work @cultivarium.bsky.social on genetic tools for Ideonella sakaiensis, a (Betaproteo-)bacterium that degrades PET plastic.

We identified a plasmid vector for the strain and generated a large RB-TnSeq library, screening for genes impacting plastic degradation.

Me reading this thread on rebuilding lichen in vitro.

I previously didn't question the claims of 'in lab lichen formation'.

A screenshot of the "Making Fungal-Photobiont Symbioses in the Lab: Past, Present, and Future of the Elusive in Vitro Lichen" by Arseniy Belosokhov and Toby Spribille published in Annual Review of Microbiology, Volume 79, 2025. Link: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-micro-051524-031834

#Lichens form their complex thalli through a partnership involving at least a fungus and an alga. But can these living structures be rebuilt in vitro? For more than a century, people have tried. With @spribille.bsky.social we revisited 150 years of #lichen #resynthesis to ask: has anyone succeeded?

Absolutely the way to fix peer review is for peer reviewers to do better reviews, not an AI to almost match the current poor level of human review. But maybe if you take away the oppotunity for humans to point out a axis label is missing, they'll find more interesting things to say?

To me the difference between a preprint on arXiv and a journal publication is, that experts in the field at least took a look and maybe suggested some changes.
If the new difference would be that an AI took on the role of the experts, the difference would feel like less.

Which might be good or bad.

📢 Postdoc position: Biochemistry & Bacterial cell biology

in our group at Marburg University, Germany, funded by the ERC Advanced Grant "C-SWITCH"

🔗More information at shorturl.at/OlvlL
📅Deadline: Nov 30, 2025

Please repost. #Postdoc

#MicroSky job openings

Doctoral (PhD) and postdoctoral position (m/f/d) in Computational Biology / Biomathematics / Biosystems Engineering

We have two job openings for computational strain design in our group! Please retweet 🧪

PhD student and postdoc!

Both positions are directly with our group leader, Steffen Klamt.

The positions are to be filled in Magdeburg, Germany.

I highly recommend applying!

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

📢 We’re hiring!
The DSMZ is looking for a Scientific Lead for the SILVA Database — a unique opportunity to shape one of the world’s most important scientific resources for microbial taxonomy and ecology.
Apply now and help us shape the future of microbial research.

👉 www.dsmz.de/dsmz/career/...

Rhodo-Box: a Synthetic Biology Toolbox to Facilitate Metabolic Engineering of Rhodobacter sphaeroides https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.31.685836v1