Rock Lab

The Sidney & Joan Pestka Graduate & Post Graduate Awards - International Cytokine & Interferon Society Nomination/Application Form The submission deadline has been extended to May 31, 2025 The Sidney & Joan Pestka Graduate & Post Graduate AwardsDescription: The Sidney & Joan Pestka Graduate and Post-Gr...

Congrats to @alercher.bsky.social of the #RiceLab, who has won the 2025 Sidney & Joan Pestka Post-Graduate Award from the @cytokinesociety.bsky.social!

Creation of new junior research groups at the Institut Pasteur - Call for applications 2026 - Research The Institut Pasteur is launching an international call to recruit new junior research group leaders leveraging cutting-edge transdisciplinary approaches to exploring infectious diseases, host-microbe...

🔬 Call to create junior research groups at the Institut Pasteur

Focus: Infectious diseases, host-microbe interactions, vaccines
Special interest: AI methodologies

📅 Deadline: Feb 9, 2026
👥 2-12 years post-PhD

Apply now 📝 research.pasteur.fr/en/call/crea...

#JobOpportunity #Research

Essential redundancies fuel Mycobacterium tuberculosis adaptation to the host Redundancy in biology is, at a glance, counterintuitive because if the function of two gene products completely overlaps then, throughout the course of evolution, one of the genes will likely accumula...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is an outlier in many ways. One of them is keeping a high degree of functional redundancy despite its obligate pathogen lifestyle. In this review, we reflect on the biological meaning of M. tuberculosis functional redundancies.

journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

Hey friends. I’m looking for a postdoc interested in studying host-pathogen interactions and immunology of tuberculosis. Send me some good people! We have a great group here! Email me joanne@pitt.edu. Thanks!

Transcription co-inhibition alters drug resistance evolution and enhances Mycobacterium tuberculosis clearance from granulomas - Nature Microbiology Targeting two distinct steps of the transcription process yields synergistic antibiotics that kill non-replicating Mycobacterium tuberculosis and reduce drug resistance.

Does this create an Achilles’ heel, and can you drug it? Turns out: yes.

Congrats to Barbara, Vanisha, Liz, and the rest of the team.

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

Antibiotic resistance mutations boost bacterial fitness in the presence of drug but can decrease fitness in its absence. We & others showed that the fitness cost of the most common rifampicin-resistance mutation in M. tuberculosis stems largely from excessive transcriptional termination.

FEBS Press CRISPRI-mediated gene silencing and phenotypic exploration in nontuberculous mycobacteria. In this Research Protocol, we describe approaches to control, monitor, and quantitatively assess CRISPRI-med...

🚀 Latest paper form the lab is now out at @febsopenbio.bsky.social
@febspress.bsky.social 🔵⚪🔴

We use CRISPRi tools from the @rocklabtb.bsky.social to target essential genes and control smooth to rough transition in M.smegmatis & M.abscessus 🦠🧫👇👇👇

febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

New research from Rockefeller's Michel Nussenzweig and colleagues finds one particular class of immune cells appears to play a crucial role in achieving a functional cure among people with HIV. #worldAIDSday

New Rockefeller research from Michael Rout and Brian Chait finds that nuclear pore complex (NPC) machinery is an extraordinarily dynamic system, offering new insights into diseases such as #cancer and #neurodegeneration that are linked to NPC breakdown: https://bit.ly/3KAlrIk

If you or someone you know is looking for a post-doctoral position working on mycobacterial envelope biology, please get in touch. I am recruiting here at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.

DNA transcription is a tightly choreographed event. A new study reveals how it is choreographed. - News Life's instructions are written in DNA, but it is the enzyme RNA polymerase II (Pol II) that reads the script, transcribing RNA in eukaryotic cells and eventually giving rise to proteins. Scientists know that Pol II must advance down the gene in perfect...

Rockefeller researchers Shixin Liu and Joel Cohen reveal how key regulatory proteins work in a precise hierarchy to meticulously adjust pacing during transcription.

Scientists can finally answer an old question about cellular aging After a finite number of divisions, cells simply give up. As each round of replication trims their telomeres--the protective caps at the chromosome ends--those caps eventually become too short to prevent chromosome ends from being recognized as DNA brea...

Cells stop dividing when telomeres become too short, a process known as replicative senescence. A new study from the #deLange lab reveals what drives this, and why cells senesce far earlier under high-oxygen conditions versus low-oxygen ones.

Sign the petition for more research funding across New York State - and share with your friends…

Design, Synthesis, and Biological Evaluation of Mono- and Diamino-Substituted Squaramide Derivatives as Potent Inhibitors of Mycobacterial Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) Synthase Amides of squaric acid are new drug candidates with activity against mycobacteria. Like the approved drug bedaquiline, these compounds achieve efficacy by inhibiting mycobacterial ATP synthase. Howeve...

Exciting collab with Paul Palme, Peter Imming, & Adrian Richter!
Guided by @courbongautier.bsky.social's structure of myco ATP synthase bound to a squaramide, they have made SQAs that are less toxic, more potent, more stable than AstraZeneca's SQ31f
#MedChem #TB #NTM
pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Sign the Petition Support a New York State Biomedical Institute for a Healthier, More Affordable Future

📢 SIGN & SHARE THE PETITION! 📢

New York needs an Empire Biomedical Research Institute to create new statewide funding opportunities for scientists & physician-scientists so that patients and their families get the life-saving and life-changing new therapeutics they're hoping for ✏️ c.org/TDMy2H9JTW

No, It’s Not “Just a Meat Allergy”: The Truth About Alpha-gal Syndrome A 47-year-old pilot’s death after eating a hamburger reveals critical gaps in our understanding

Sharing this article that I wrote with my husband, @jutraslab.bsky.social for @unbiasedscipod.bsky.social. Last week researchers reported what appears to be the first clearly documented fatality from alpha‑gal syndrome.

#Scicomm #tickbornediseases #alphagalsyndrome

Prodrug florfenicol amine is activated by intrinsic resistance to target Mycobacterium abscessus - Nature Microbiology Florfenicol amine hijacks intrinsic resistance in Mycobacterium abscessus, highlighting that antimicrobial resistance mechanisms can be harnessed for antibiotic activation.

Our new paper, which presents a novel strategy for targeting antibiotic resistance, is now available in Nature Microbiology.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

With the Wilmanns lab @embl.org we reveal cryoEM structures of an essential, bifunctional acyl-CoA carboxylase from mycobacteria. @wertheimufscripps.bsky.social

This ~ 600 kDa enzyme is asymmetric, rotatory, has unusual stoichiometry, and unique E5 subunits.

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

#microsky

The phenotypic landscape of the mycobacterial cell

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

Systems analysis reveals alternate metabolic states adopted by Mycobacterium tuberculosis across species Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) persists within macrophages, yet how different host species shape bacterial state remains poorly understood. Here, we directly compared the intracellular transcriptome...

Excited to share our lab's newest preprint (strap in if you're excited about metabolism, species differences, or Mtb gene expression): www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📢 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

Immunopeptidomics can inform the design of mRNA vaccines for the delivery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis MHC class II antigens MHC class II immunopeptidomics in human phagocytes infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis enables vaccine immunogen design and optimization.

Excited to share our newest manuscript on antigen discovery and vaccine design for tuberculosis lead by Owen Leddy (everyone hiring new faculty in a few years, remember this name!)

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #TBsky

Immunopeptidomics can inform the design of mRNA vaccines for the delivery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis MHC class II antigens MHC class II immunopeptidomics in human phagocytes infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis enables vaccine immunogen design and optimization.

Congrats @thebrysonlab.bsky.social!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Cryo-EM maps and atomic models of the biotin-containing 3-methylcrotonyl-CoA carboxylase (MCC) complex and long-chain acyl-CoA carboxylase (LCC) complex

New lab preprint!
@zestytoast.bsky.social tagged a scarce mycobacterial protein in M. smegmatis with TwinStep but got… something? @kjamali.bsky.social's ModelAngelo built models & @martinsteinegger.bsky.social's FoldSeek IDed them as the biotin-containing MCC & LCC complexes
🧵
tinyurl.com/ukny4ptz

Two group leader positions available in the broader areas of RNA science, RNA technologies, and RNA medicine. Attractive packages and a great environment. Come and join us at Helmholtz RNA Würzburg, Bavaria.

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.

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.

Ditto. Thanks for this Sarah. www.statnews.com/2025/10/06/g...

We're hiring! Check out our ad and please re-post or forward to interested #Microbiology parties: apply.interfolio.com/174783

UChicago Microbiology is searching for tenured or tenure-track faculty working in host-pathogens interactions, viral and bacterial pathogenesis, and emerging infectious diseases. Come join our vibrant Department! microbiology.uchicago.edu
Apply here apply.interfolio.com/174404

Department of Microbiology | The University of Chicago

UChicago Microbiology is searching for tenured or tenure-track faculty working in host-pathogens interactions, viral and bacterial pathogenesis, and emerging infectious diseases. Come join our vibrant Department! microbiology.uchicago.edu
Apply here apply.interfolio.com/174404