Sebastian Wenk

Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät Heute ernannte Rektorin Prof. Dr. Anja Steinbeck den Biotechnologen Dr. Johannes Rebelein zum W3-Professor für Nachhaltige Biotechnologie. Rebelein wird damit auch Direktor des Instituts für Molekular...

A childhood dream has come true – I was appointed Full Professor for Sustainable Biotechnology at the University of Düsseldorf @hhu.de : tinyurl.com/f43s74hp and as Director of the Institute for Molecular Enzyme Technology (IMET, www.iet.uni-duesseldorf.de/en/) at FZ Jülich @fz-juelich.de .

I have a postdoc position in metagenomic exploration available in my group. Candidates with documented experience in phylo & metagenomics and preferably with petabase-scale data mining and GLM workflows are encouraged to apply. Come join us! 🧬🦠💻

Please repost

Apply here: www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/p...

Time to leverage SynBio for tacking environmental pollution. But releasing bioengineered microorganisms still raises alarms. A new narrative is badly needed: bacteria for bioremediation are not alien intrusions but laboratory-trained extensions of life’s creativity link.springer.com/10.1038/s443...

Unconstitutional force. Civilians dead. Congress bypassed. Oil interests front and center.

We’ve seen this movie before and it ends in blood. But we don’t have to do it again.

Doing a PhD is - at heart - one long discussion with your mentor. The discussion changes over time - with unexpected turns and ups & downs - but through it all is a pair of people discussing a topic endlessly to make sense of it.
PhD students: choose someone you like to talk to!

Congratulations 🎉🎉🎉 to our esteemed #microbiology @ribesresearch.bsky.social colleague @cuwelte.bsky.social on being the proud recipient of a prestigious @erc.europa.eu consolidator grant on electroANME.
All the best with your research. Very well deserved :) erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

ERC’s new €7m Plus Grants open to researchers at any career stage - Research Professional News European Research Council president describes scheme as part attempt to lure US talent

Let’s run the numbers on this new @ERC_Research “ERC-Plus” scheme. About 30 grants to be awarded, and we’re told “better apply for a regular grant, your chances are 30× higher.”

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-euro...

Industrial and agricultural chemicals exhibit antimicrobial activity against human gut bacteria in vitro - Nature Microbiology Screening of 1,076 compounds reveals 168 chemical pollutants with inhibitory effects on gut bacteria and genetic screens indicate commonality between pollutant and antibiotic resistance.

Excited to share our latest research in @natmicrobiol.nature.com . We uncover hundreds of inhibitory interactions between common chemical pollutants and human gut bacteria. A thread🧵 (1/10) #microbiomesky #microsky @kiranrpatil.bsky.social lab @mrc-tu.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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...

Fluorescein-based dyes are not valid reporters of oxidative stress in bacteria, and conclusions based on their use must be reconsidered | PNAS Dihydrodichlorofluorescein derivatives have been employed as reporters of intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) in innumerable studies. Their...

Hmmm
This work has so many implications on literature 😳😬

Fluorescein-based dyes are not valid reporters of oxidative stress in bacteria, and conclusions based on their use must be reconsidered | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Prashant Singh in the lab of Tina Iverson at Vanderbilt published this image of the bacterial 🦠flagellar motor, a detailed molecular model made possibly by CryoEM 🔬.

The similarity to mechanical motors are strong enough we can use terms like stator, rotor, rod & gearing to describe it.

Black and white photograph of six-year-old Ruby Bridges, wearing a dark dress and white cardigan and carrying a School bag, accompanied by three FBI agents in dark suits.

Sixty-five years ago today, four first-graders desegregated New Orleans's public schools: Ruby Bridges at William Frantz Elementary School, and Leona Tate, Tessie Provost, and Gail Etienne at McDonogh 19 Elementary School. They faced violent mobs and threats to their lives. They were 6 years old. 🗃

Metagenomic editing of commensal bacteria in vivo using CRISPR-associated transposases Although metagenomic sequencing has revealed a rich microbial biodiversity in the mammalian gut, methods to genetically alter specific species in the microbiome are highly limited. Here, we introduce ...

Very excited to share our latest work in Science on metagenomic editing (MetaEdit) of the gut microbiome in vivo & directly modifying unculturable immune-modulatory SFB bug in the small intestine. 🦠🧬🛠️
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very nice. Looking forward to a more detailed read!

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.

Prof. Hamilton Smith at J. Craig Venter Institute, a Nobel laureate for discovering type II restriction enzymes, passed away last night.
@jcvi.org @nobelprize.bsky.social
A huge loss in Science, but his legacy will be remembered.
www.jcvi.org/about/hamilt...

Such an honor! Can’t wait to visit Brno next week, the place I’ve been teaching about in Genetics course for years but never visited (I feel like I know the garden and the monastery from what I read).

Thaaaank you Helena 🙏

doi.org/10.1016/j.ym...

Enjoy the read — and I’m always happy to hear your thoughts or feedback!

Kudos to my long-term friend and collaborator Maren Nattermann and the fantastic team at the Max-Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg for another inspiring collaboration.

Very proud of my former students Jenny Bakker, Karin Schann, and Maximilian Pfeifer Boinot , who carried out this challenging work under constrained conditions in the fading Bar-Even lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam.

We built and evolved a pathway that activates formate, turns it into formaldehyde, and feeds it into metabolism. This shows that we can likely convert RuMP methylotrophs into RuMP formatotrophs through this simple intervention.

“Evolution-assisted engineering of formate assimilation via the formyl phosphate route in Escherichia coli” is now out in Metabolic Engineering.

In our new study we used enzyme engineering and evolution to teach E. coli a new trick: to grow using CO2-derived formate via a fully synthetic metabolic route that nature never tried.

🔥🔥🔥 Friday Evening, Paper Out, Feierabend 🔥🔥🔥

When evolution and enzyme engineering team up, they can convince microbes to assimilate sustainable carbon substrates preparing them for a life in a circular bioeconomy.

doi.org/10.1016/j.ym...

Unlike the heart attack of getting a “Decision” email, it’s such a good feeling to get a “Your review is ready” email from qed :)

Photo: Cecilia Odlind

The 2025 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for their groundbreaking discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance that prevents the immune system from harming the body 🧪 www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medic...

"Jane Goodall showed us what a life in science could look like: rigorous discovery paired with fierce advocacy for what you study. She gave the world six decades of groundbreaking research on chimpanzees and their habitats, then turned that knowledge into a global movement for conservation." (1/2)

Once upon a time Desk Editors quietly fixed minor issues in accepted papers to ensure format compliance. Now, even the smallest formatting slip sends a ms back to the authors for trivial corrections. Is this really about maintaining standards—or just saving salaries of those used to handle this 🤔?

Diese #Klimademo war laut, bunt, wütend, hoffnungsvoll - ich bin stolz auf dich #Berlin, weiter so 💪🏻