Josh Atkinson

Live thread of the NSF biology virtual office hour:

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Impact of tiny anoxic pockets in #Nitrogen loss on sandy shores!!
Our newly developed #microfluidic method revealed #microorganisms on sand grains create anoxic microenvironments allowing #denitrification in well-oxygenated sands

www.mpi-bremen.de/en/Nitrogen-...

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

Nature should be the model for microbial sciences | Journal of Bacteriology Historically, our understanding of microbes has been based on laboratory cultures. Much of what we know at a mechanistic level is based on “model organisms” which are species that readily grow in labo...

Today's reading: Nature should be the model for microbial sciences journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... by @brettbakker.bsky.social @emilyraehyde.bsky.social and @pedroleao.bsky.social

Looks ideal for a talk I am working on on model organisms ...

Iron reduction under oxic conditions by Microbacterium deferre sp. nov. A1-JKT - Nature Communications In this study, the authors show that Microbacterium deferre A1-JK, a newly isolated Gram-positive bacterium, simultaneously reduces oxygen and iron under oxic conditions, revealing unexpected microbia...

Iron reduction under oxic conditions by Microbacterium deferre sp. nov. A1-JKT www.nature.com/articles/s41... #jcampubs

We're hiring! Do you have experience engineering yeast and using CRISPR? Jose Avalos and I are hiring a joint postdoc to work on an exciting fast-paced DARPA project with a great team at Neochromosome, Fermeate, and @joepeterslab.bsky.social

puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Barbara McClintock portrait

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬

Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

I made a survey over at Mastodon and found that Fusilli are mostly right-handed spirals, but about a third of the brands is left-handed.

So far there seems to be no racemic Fusilli brand. Pasta producerst have achieved a degree of enantiomeric purity chemists can only dream of.
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#chemsky

Cross-order detection of bacteriophage transduction in communities using ribosomal RNA barcoding Bacteriophages (phages) facilitate gene transfer and microbial evolution in all ecosystems and have applications as tools for engineering microbiomes and as antimicrobials. Historic efforts to map pha...

Very excited to share a manuscript at the heart of my PhD! We added an RNA-memory device (RAM) to phage P1 to identify transduction hosts in synthetic and wastewater microbial communities in high throughput. Also, I am on the post-doc market, so please reach out if interested! 1/6

t.ly/a8k9O

I'd like to share a little bit of happy lab news in these chaotic times: a new preprint, driven by the brilliant Qinhao Cao!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
We address a big challenge in synbio: If you give me a protein "X", how can I give you a version of X whose activity is controlled by a kinase?

Detailed and concise 1-pager explaining what F&A does and how it underlies the competitive advantages of American sciences.

F&A pays PEOPLE and allows universities to be the anchors of regional economies that they are!

🔗 www.cogr.edu/sites/defaul...

The Center for Electromicrobiology (@cemau.bsky.social) has just joined BlueSky! This is the @dg.dk Center for Excellence at @aarhusuni.bsky.social. Follow @cemau.bsky.social for news about cable bacteria!

Great way to start off 2025. Thanks to @kunjapur.bsky.social for organizing. Looking forward to the next one! #MASBN

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us in Hawaiʻi for the first International SynBYSS Conference! It was a successful and dynamic 4 days filled with insightful science, networking and fun.

Could you please add me. Thanks for organizing

Engineering history with Asgard archaea of the kingdom Promethearchaeati - Nature Microbiology Multiple histories converge in Masaru Nobu’s story of culturing an archaeon closely related to us eukaryotes.

Why did an engineer become a researcher in biological evolution? My esteemed research partner, colleague, and friend, Masaru K. Nobu, is sharing some side stories about strain MK-D1 research.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The field of "biochemical genetics", as they called it.

Tapping into Bacterial Conversations | HHMI Over the course of 30 years, HHMI Investigator Bonnie Bassler has helped usher in a new branch of science centered on quorum sensing, the process by which bacteria communicate with one another and orc...

Conversation with the brilliant contemporary microbiologist and molecular biologist—HHMI and MacArthur Fellow Bonnie Bassler of Princeton University

Pioneer in the chemical signaling mechanisms that bacteria use to communicate with each other known as “quorum sensing”

www.hhmi.org/news/tapping...