Jay Hinton

In Our Time - Bacteriophages - BBC Sounds Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how viruses can help us track and cure bacterial illnesses

🦠 “𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗶𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝘀 — 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘄?”

Historian @kirchhelle.bsky.social chats with 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗮 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗲 & 𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗘𝗯𝗱𝗲𝗻 about revival of phage biology & phage therapy as antibiotics fail.

🎧 2024 BBC Radio 4 — listen worldwide:

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

#phage #phagesky #microsky

Sabotaging the NSF fellowship is a blunder Over the last year, the Trump administration has sent one discouraging message after another to young people aspiring to a scientific career in the United States. The corrosive rhetoric that mocks sci...

😓😢

Sabotaging the NSF fellowship is a blunder | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The metabolome of an E. coli CRISPRi library identifies benefits of minimal metabolite levels and targets for engineering Rapp et al. combine genome-scale CRISPRi and metabolomics in E. coli. CRISPRi of enzymes enforces metabolite accumulation, which leads to regulatory crosstalk and side reactions. This suggests that ma...

😮👀
The metabolome of an E. coli CRISPRi library identifies benefits of minimal metabolite levels and targets for engineering: Cell Systems www.cell.com/cell-systems...

Dozens of researchers will move to France from US following high-profile bid to lure talent Large proportion worked at Columbia University, which had its grants cut and frozen by the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Almost all of the scientists were previously at US institutions

go.nature.com/4qMlrUR

Poster for the 2nd Aerosols and Microbiology conference, June 9-11, 2026, at Leeds Marriott Hotel, UK, with microscopic aerosol imagery.

Join us for our 2nd Aerosols and Microbiology: Bridging disciplines to advance health & environmental sustainability meeting.

📅Date: 9–11 June 2026
📍 Location: Leeds Marriott Hotel, UK

Register your place: https://microb.io/Aerosols2026

#Microbiology #Conference #Health #Research

Don’t deprioritize curiosity-driven research Around the world, governments are demanding that research funding follow broader political priorities. They should be careful what they wish for.

Don’t deprioritize curiosity-driven research www.nature.com/articles/d41...

By my count, this is the third CDC outbreak notice in the past three months involving Moringa leaf and various Salmonella strains. What's with that?

Technical Programme Manager | Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine Technical Project ManagerLocation: LiverpoolContract: Fixed-term contract until March 2028Salary: £47,389 - £59,967The Parish Lab at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine focuses on antimicrobial ...

Are you interested in being the first biologist in our new team? Come join our small but growing group. Deadline for applications is 3rd March. #Tuberculosis 🧪🦠 #TBDrugDiscovery

Congratulations to Mariana Byndloss @maribyndloss.bsky.social for her promotion to Associate Professor with tenure at Vanderbilt University @vanderbilt.edu

Photo credit: Bäumler lab archives

So happy to see this story out! Incredible work on systematically standardizing a good cellular model for iNTS-macrophage interactions, which clearly shows how different Salmonella pathovariants are in terms of intracellular behaviour!
@jayhinton.bsky.social

Bloodstream-associated Salmonella Typhimurium and Enteritidis iNTS pathovariants hyper-replicate in human macrophages https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.28.702237v1

National Lab of the Rockies, formerly NREL, lays off more than 130 employees The cuts impacted staffers engaged in both research and operations at the lab.

😢 this is seriously unfortunate. Many places, same story.

www.cpr.org/2026/02/09/n...

Congratulations to Çagla Tükel @caglatukel.bsky.social for her election to fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology! asm.social/2OC

CHECK IT OUT 🦠👀

Very cool article by science journalist Carrie Arnold reviewing recent research from leading laboratories on how the unique shape of a microbial #biofilm emerges from interactions of its component microbes with each other and their environment

www.quantamagazine.org/how-a-biofil...

Large-scale analysis of bacterial genomes reveals thousands of lytic phages - Nature Microbiology Diverse genomes of lytic phages are found in bacterial assemblies, challenging assumptions about the nature of the lytic lifestyle.

#NewResearch

Diverse genomes of lytic phages are found in bacterial assemblies, challenging assumptions about the nature of the lytic lifestyle.

#MicroSky 🦠

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

Persistent virulent phages exist across bacterial isolates - Nature Microbiology The long-term existence of diverse virulent phages within cultures of Escherichia coli and others challenges the virulent–temperate dichotomy and points to non-canonical phage lifestyles.

#NewResearch

The long-term existence of diverse virulent phages within cultures of Escherichia coli and others challenges the virulent–temperate dichotomy and points to non-canonical phage lifestyles.

#MicroSky 🦠 @peterdoug.bsky.social @emggroupucph.bsky.social

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

Tragic news -Helene’s death is an immense loss for the Salmonella research community. We’re grateful for her ground-breaking discoveries about Salmonella virulence

We will miss her great insights & kindness. Helene faced her cancer diagnosis with impressive courage & openness. An example to us all.

Friday we lost a brilliant mind, colleague, and friend to her battle with pancreatic cancer. Those who knew her will remember Helene Andrews-Polymenis for her warmth, generosity and leadership. She will be missed by many. RIP

Predicting drug inactivation by changes in bacterial growth dynamics - npj Antimicrobials and Resistance npj Antimicrobials and Resistance - Predicting drug inactivation by changes in bacterial growth dynamics

Our recent paper in npj Antimicrobials and Resistance is a great example of scientific serendipity: after staring at thousands of bacterial growth curves over many studies, we started wondering whether the curve shapes themselves carry mechanistic information 1/9 🦠🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

High-throughput transposon mutagenesis defines the essential genome of diverse phages Phages are important drivers of bacterial evolution with therapeutic potential as antimicrobials. However, gaps in our understanding of phages and our inability to rapidly engineer them with new genet...

#microsky #phagesky

The 3rd (? Lost track!) manuscript on a CRISPR/anti-CRISPR -based transposon tool to study gene essentiality in #phages

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A family of linear plasmid phages that detect a quorum-sensing autoinducer exists in multiple bacterial species | mBio The discovery of quorum-sensing responsive linear plasmid phages has transformed understanding of phage-bacterial interactions by demonstrating inter-domain chemical communication. To date, however, e...

The final form of my 2nd postdoc paper with the Bassler Lab! Turns out our favorite quorum-sensing phage isn’t a one-off, but rather a member of a globally dispersed family of phages that sense a universal autoinducer.

#phagesky #microsky

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Embracing the unknown: Proteomic insights into the human microbiome Protein-level investigations into the human microbiome provide insights into active microbial functions. Recently, Valdés-Mas et al. introduced a metagenome-informed metaproteomics approach to functio...

Thank you Shaopu_Wang and colleagues for highlighting our latest work in a nice N&V

www.cell.com/cell-metabol...

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

Bacterial population structure and clade-specific sampling affect machine learning predictions of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Top: An illustration of defining clades for genomes in one species. R: resistant (triangles), S: susceptible (circles). Bottom left: An example of training scenarios for scheme B based on the clade splitting in shown above. Models were trained on all samples except for resistant or susceptible samples from one clade. The held-out genomes from the same clade were used as the test sets. Bottom right: The precision and recall scores for scheme B; a-random and b-random indicate testing on random train-test splits of the pathological unbalanced data.

#MachineLearning methods are used to predict #AntimicrobialResistance #AMR from genomic data. @lbarquist.bsky.social &co show that sampling biases driven by population structure severely undermine the accuracy of AMR prediction models even with large datasets @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4iZ0zXQ

European Academy of Microbiology Announces Professor Cecília M. Arraiano as New President - FEMS The European Academy of Microbiology (EAM) is proud to announce the appointment of Professor Cecília Maria Arraiano as its new President, effective 1 January 2026. Prof. Arraiano brings a distinguishe...

Very good news ‼️

fems-microbiology.org/european-aca...

@femsmicro.org

An iterative fractionation approach to identify antimicrobial proteins in snake venom Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) increasingly poses a significant global health challenge. New antimicrobials are desperately needed, driving the need to explore novel sources of natural products. Snake...

🔔New Preprint🔔

Just posted on Access Microbiology (first time using this platform, seems great!) our work on looking for antimicrobial proteins in snake venom. This is work from the first bit of funding I received and the project (1/3)

www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

#MicroSky

New paper from the lab!
Led by Patrick Müller: we show that non-antibiotic compounds — but not macrolide antibiotics — can induce an efflux pump that protects Bacteroidaceae from macrolides.
A neat twist on drug–microbe interactions... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Very interesting new protective response in live (!) neutrophils against bacterial infection:

STREAMS guidelines: standards for technical reporting in environmental and host-associated microbiome studies - Nature Microbiology This Consensus Statement presents the standards for technical reporting in environmental and host-associated microbiome studies (STREAMS) guidelines.

#ConsensusStatement

A new Consensus Statement presents the standards for technical reporting in environmental and host-associated microbiome studies (STREAMS) guidelines.

#MicroSky #MicrobiomeSky 🦠

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

Systematic discovery of TIR-based immune signaling systems in bacteria Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR) domains are important for immune signaling across humans, plants and bacteria. These domains were recently found to produce immune signaling molecules in plant immuni...

#microsky #phagesky #phge defence

Preprint from the @soreklab.bsky.social reporting a plethora of novel TIR-based immune signalling systems

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...