Souvik Bhattacharyya

Dear Director Bhattacharya: After sending my previous email, I discovered your review of Dr. Fauci’s memoir (“On Call: A Doctor’s Journey into Public Service”) published in Reason (https://reason.com/2024/10/06/the-man-who-thought-he-was-science/?nab=1 ). I am glad to know that you are aware of Dr. Fauci’s accomplishments and even acknowledge grudging respect for some of these. But your review, while accusing Dr. Fauci of various missteps is full of the same smugness of which you accuse Dr. Fauci.

A follow-up to yesterday's email to Director Bhattacharya...

1/12

Thrilled to share our multidisiplinary work on how genome-wide DNA bridging by H-NS reshapes the stationary phase bacterial nucleoid and affects the transcriptional landscape. With Xindan Wang and @meyerroc.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

“Twitter sucks now and all the cool kids are moving to Bluesky:” Our new survey shows that scientists no longer find Twitter professionally useful or pleasant My colleague Dr. Julia Wester and I have a new paper out in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology reporting on the results of a survey distributed to over 800 scientists, science educator…

ICYMI, here is the press release for my study with @drjuliawester.bsky.social - we surveyed over 800 scientists who use social media. They overwhelmingly agree that Twitter is no longer useful or pleasant, and that for all professional online scientist goals, Bluesky is superior.
🧪 #SciComm 🌍

I don’t know who needs to hear this but the CDC is being eviscerated right now. America is not going to have any kind of outbreak response capacity after tonight. Americans’ health data is no longer secure. Say goodbye to federal public health in any capacity. It’s a disaster. We won’t recover.

Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials

Fustiliarian Friday: Trump/Kennedy/GOP use the shutdown as an excuse to destroy the CDC’s elite field epidemiology team and one of the most important epidemiology journals in the world.

Gift link.

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

Is a healthy microbiome one that is rich in phages? 🦠 Excited to share our paper out in Lancet Microbe with @bkoskella.bsky.social & @dholtappels.bsky.social where we test whether virome diversity can be used a broad signature of microbiome health 📈

The official website of the Nobel Prize - NobelPrize.org The Nobel Prize rewards science, humanism and peace efforts. This is one of the central concepts in the will of Alfred Nobel, and it also permeates the outreach activities that have been developed for...

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S.
Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world.
www.nobelprize.org

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

Here's my comment--join me. This would effectively remove foreign PhD students and postdocs from our labs. please share

Dual transposon sequencing profiles the genetic interaction landscape in bacteria Gene redundancy complicates systematic characterization of gene function as single-gene deletions may not produce discernible phenotypes. We report dual transposon sequencing (dual Tn-seq), a platform...

Dual transposon sequencing profiles the genetic interaction landscape in bacteria | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What if NIH had been 40% smaller? Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research.

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

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.
Thread 1/n

🌍🦋 Across 6 continents, 21 sites & 15,000 paper moths, we joined a worldwide experiment led by @wlallen.bsky.social & Iliana Medina, showing how ecological context shapes the evolution of animal colouration.

Proud to be part of this global team effort: doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Phenomenal. In my 10 year update of A Brief History, I make the point that in the first edition, not one disease had been successfully treated using gene therapy. Today that number is at least 7.

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that can slow its progression and transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC.

Anyway, here is some actually incredible news

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Sure, done!

PIWI clade Argonautes are essential for transposon silencing. Without them, animals are sterile due to massive transposon activity.

But how does piRNA-guided target interaction translate into silencing?

PhD student Júlia Portell Montserrat has an intriguing answer

www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

NIH Director’s Pulsing Neck Tumor Announces Cancer Research Cuts

NIH Director’s Pulsing Neck Tumor Announces Cancer Research Cuts

A graph of the US population that is left-handed, by birth year. It drops from about 5% to a low of a little more than 3% from ~1890 to ~1910. It then rises steadily to about 12% around 1950, and stays at 12% out to 2000.

This is the graph we show whenever someone talks about how back in the old days there weren't (people who are not whoever the person speaking thinks are the default).

Mostly we do this to underscore that a rise in apparent frequency isn't always a rise in real frequency.

My quote of the day

A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind - the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy.

Jackie Robinson (1963)

Hydrogen sulfide production distinguishes Salmonella from close relatives, but its biological significance remains obscure. This study uncovers the secret: Salmonella uses hydrogen sulfide production as a weapon to outcompete E. coli and gain a foothold in the gut.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Revisiting a Breathtaking Publication in the History of Molecular Biology

The last publication (he says!) from Rich Losick, my PhD advisor.

Historical in nature it focuses on a seminal paper in molecular biology, the study revealing the genetic code to be triplet in nature. Come for the science, appreciate the clear prose!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Assistant Professor - Molecular Biosciences Department Name / Number: Molecular Biosciences / 0-1210-000 College: College of Arts and Sciences Hiring Salary: Negotiable Appointment Start Date: August 7, 2026 The Department of Molecular Bioscien...

We are hiring! Please share the news.

Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Bacterial Pathogenesis

See link below for details.

We are a vibrantly growing department with friendly colleagues and supportive environment. Bonus: year-round sunshine in Tampa, FL 🌤🌴

Job Ad: tinyurl.com/USF-Microbio...

Major Medical Prizes Given to Cell Biology and Cystic Fibrosis Pioneers

So great to see Lucy Shapiro — a scientific hero of mine both for her pioneering work and for her incredible communication skills —honored today www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/h...

Efficient sequence alignment against millions of prokaryotic genomes with LexicMap - Nature Biotechnology LexicMap uses a fixed set of probes to efficiently query gene sequences for fast and low-memory alignment.

Sometimes you meet absolutely incredible bioinfo-magicians.
It was a huge privilege when @shenwei356.bsky.social
joined our group for a year on an @embl.org sabbatical.
While here, he developed a new way of aligning to
millions of bacteria, called LexicMap 1/n
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

With Jeff Barrick's return to #MSU, the #LTEE was restarted today after a short pause (frozen) for the move.

Today was daily transfer 12,301. With ~6.6 generations per day, they are now at ~82,007 generations.

100,000 generations is fast approaching! Are you ready, #Spartans?

@msumgi.bsky.social

New in JB: Kuchma, Geiger, O'Toole et al. use genetic to probe flagellar-mediated surface sensing by P. aeruginosa. (always fun to advertise my own JB papers!)
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
@asm.org #JBacteriology

Pseudomonas aeruginosa senses exopolysaccharide trails using type IV pili and adhesins during biofilm formation - Nature Microbiology Opposing forces generated by exopolysaccharide trail binding versus type IV pilus retraction generate a high cyclic diGMP–high cyclic AMP state in Pseudomonas aeruginosa that promotes social motility.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa senses exopolysaccharide trails using type IV pili and adhesins during biofilm formation by O'Toole, Parsek, & Wong groups www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How can we understand the earliest events in evolution of eukaryotic immunity? @yao-li.bsky.social reports incredible molecular fossils of complete bacterial-like operons in eukaryotes that illuminate how animal immunity was first acquired from anti-phage defense

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