Morgan Feeney

Microbial Primer: Ancientbiotics – making modern antimicrobials from historical infection remedies The modern antibiotic era began in the early twentieth century, but humans have long used materials from the natural world to attempt to treat the symptoms of infection. In this primer, we will discus...

Why should microbiologists be interested in historical infection remedies, and how can we best investigate them for antimicrobial discovery? Thoroughly enjoyed co-writing this Microbiology Primer with @tosinorababa.bsky.social www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... #MicroSky #Ancientbiotics

Not sure my skills are up to electrical engineering but they are gorgeous micrographs of course! ❤️

Thanks!!! That's super helpful!!!

Yes no, explorer cells are great! But possibly a little more complexity than what is needed for what I am trying to do (make a giant model of Streptomyces using yarn)

Streptomyces friends! What do we think about the relative width of aerial vs vegetative mycelia? Same, or is one thicker than the other?

Good to see this out - new CRISPRi work from the
@ryanfseipke.bsky.social lab/ #microsky #streptomyces

A platform for CRISPRi-seq in Streptomyces albidoflavus

journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

tRNA-Mediated Plasmid Stabilization for Antibiotic-Free Applications in Escherichia coli Plasmids are essential tools in molecular biology and biotechnology. In research laboratories, it is common to use antibiotic selection markers to ensure that plasmids are stably maintained in a cellu...

A little Christmas gift for the molecular biology nerds! I love the simplicity of this idea: very useful (and small) plasmid selection system that alleviates the need for antibiotics in molbio and bioprocesses. Elegant work by my former PhD student, lab, and colleagues: doi.org/10.1021/acss...

You spend your life learning the natural history of the prokaryotes with all this complex taxonomy and then right when you are so proud of your well earned wisdom all the names change just in time for your brain to be too old to handle it

So happy to see Mark recognised for his incredible work. Over a ~40 year career he and his group discovered ECF sigma factors, characterised many key developmental regulators of the Streptomyces lifecycle, and identified new mechanisms of bacterial gene regulation, antibiotic action and resistance.

Poster advertising a microbiology virtual escape room

Can you help my final year project student with her research please?

If you are a student, please try her virtual escape room! tinyurl.com/mr88k53k

If you are not a student, please share/repost to help us reach more students!

Lac operon: Two gems from the early days (1|2) by Christoph — When I recently wrote about noise in the basement of the lac operon, I stumbled across two papers in said basement, both of which I – and not only I – consider gems of early molecular biology: 'Isolation of the lac repressor' (Gilbert & Müller-Hill, 1966), and 'The nucleotide sequence of the lac operator' (Gilbert & Maxam, 1973). Here in part 1, I will dust off the lac repressor story a bit to make this gem sparkle again...

Lac operon: Two gems from the early days (1|2)

by Christoph — When I recently wrote about noise in the basement of the lac operon, I stumbled across two papers in said basement, both of which I – and not only I – consider gems of early molecular biology: 'Isolation of the lac repressor'…

Systematic mapping of bacteriophage gene essentiality with HIDEN‑SEQ The constant arms race of bacteriophages and their bacterial hosts has inspired major breakthroughs in biotechnology and shaped phages as fierce predators with great clinical potential to fight multid...

#microsky #phagesky

(Fancy!) transposon-insertion sequencing identifies essential genes in #phage. By @aharms485.bsky.social & Co.

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

Come and work with me and @ariannebabina.bsky.social on #Streptomyces evolution and antibiotic production

Origins of a tangled bank: Adaptation and evolution in antibiotic-producing Streptomyces

www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate...

please repost

Well, both really, but especially the flowers :)

Pretty flowers in a mug on a desk

What a lovely way to brighten up the day!!!

Why You Must Plot Your Growth Data On Semi-log Graph Paper by Elio — Take our word for it. For experiment involving growing cells, bacterial or otherwise, God meant you to pay attention to the conditions of growth. He also meant you to plot the results of a g...

Periodic reminder that growth curves need semi-log plots!

schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2...

Wheelchair Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets

Super super super recommend Grace Petrie's Fringe show - two nights left!!! Absolutely brilliant!! www.edfringe.com/tickets/what...

tRNA modification profiling reveals epitranscriptome regulatory networks in Pseudomonas aeruginosa Abstract. Transfer RNA (tRNA) modifications have emerged as critical post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression affecting diverse biological and di

#microsky tRNA modifications in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Our new preprint is out! EEC1 is a massive 4.2 Mb secondary chromosome from Embleya australiensis. Conserved across Embleya, these are the first replicons of their kind in Actinobacteria and the largest secondary replicons in bacteria identified to-date!

1/6 🦠🧪🧬🔬

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

“Changing how many chromosomes your host has?? Phages shouldn’t have that power” — my labmate

Great news - this work is now published!! Big congrats to @yeowjiang.bsky.social - amazing that he mastered cryo-EM and now solved his 2nd set of strs! And kudos to Chee Geng (& Nadege) for non-trivial homogeneous purification of TolQRA!

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

#MicroSky #SGBUG 1/4

Host glutathione is required for Rickettsia parkeri cell division and intracellular survival Nature Communications - Rickettsia species are bacterial pathogens that obligately reside in the host cell cytosol. Here, Sun et al. report that Rickettsia use host glutathione as a nutrient source...

I'm excited to share the final version of some fun work from our lab. A few interesting phenotypes - depleting host glutathione causes intracellular Rickettsia to form long chains and get restricted by antibacterial autophagy. Congrats to the team!

urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

han solo from star wars is pointing at the camera in a room . ALT: han solo from star wars is pointing at the camera in a room .

Thank you to everyone who has used pyani over the years (I know it's thousands of people!) but we have now archived the repository.

But we have replaced it with a completely rewritten and extended implementation: pyani-plus!

github.com/pyani-plus/p...

1/

YouTube video by Science Communication Lab The Most Beautiful Experiment: Meselson and Stahl

Just learned that Frank Stahl (of the Meselson and Stahl DNA replication experiment ("the most beautiful experiment in biology") died at the beginning of April, to no fanfare. Here's a lovely video of them reminiscing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-tn...

Thanks so much for everyone who came out in person or online to hear me talk about our LLM course today at UNSW.

thebullshitmachines.com

Extended Shine-Dalgarno motifs govern translation initiation in Staphylococcus aureus Regulation of translation initiation is central to bacterial adaptation, but species-specific mechanisms remain poorly understood. We present high-resolution mapping of translation start sites in S. a...

Extended Shine-Dalgarno motifs govern translation initiation in Staphylococcus aureus. On non-canonical start codons, leader peptide, codon rarity, ribosome pausing 🦠 #microsky #rnasky #ribosome www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cyclic-di-AMP modulates cellular turgor in response to defects in bacterial cell wall synthesis - Nature Microbiology Brogan et al. uncover a signalling pathway in which levels of the nucleotide second messenger c-di-AMP increase in response to defects in cell wall synthesis. This regulatory pathway decreases turgor ...

Cyclic-di-AMP modulates cellular turgor in response to defects in bacterial cell wall synthesis - www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A bacterial regulatory uORF senses multiple classes of ribosome-targeting antibiotics An upstream open-reading frame in Escherichia coli regulates expression of the downstream genes in response to diverse translation stresses.

A bacterial regulatory uORF senses multiple classes of ribosome-targeting antibiotics
elifesciences.org/articles/101...

How does your favorite species elongate? 🧵 "Phenotypic plasticity in bacterial elongation among closely related species". Happy to see this paper in print @natcomms.nature.com. Nice work by @mariedelaby.bsky.social, Liu Yang et al. See original 🧵, different colours, same data and conclusions.

An announcement graphic with a repeating blue black and yellow heaxagonal pattern that fades into white in the middle. The BMA logo appears in the middle, underneath which text reads "Save the Date, Black in Micro Week, October 14-16 2025"

Ahem (clears throat). We are pleased to announce:

✨ 🧑🏾‍🔬 Black In Micro Week Returns 🦠
Get ready for October 2025!! Stay tuned for *abstract* submissions and full *program* info released this summer. COMING SOON.

We're Baaaaaack #BlackInMicro #BiM2025 #BlackInMicrobiology