Luis E. Valentin-Alvarado

✨New preprint!

🧵1/4 Excited to share our work on AI-guided design of minimal RNA-guided nucleases. Amazing work by @petrskopintsev.bsky.social @isabelesain.bsky.social @evandeturk.bsky.social et al!
Multi-lab collaboration @banfieldlab.bsky.social @jhdcate.bsky.social @jacobsenucla.bsky.social🧬

🔗👇

Confused by all the histones that are cropping up in organisms that are decidedly NOT eukaryotes? check out our review - fantastic work by team NucEvo in the #Lugerlab
The Expanding Histone Universe: Histone-Based DNA Organization in Noneukaryotic Organisms - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

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...

I’m happy to share our new preprint! We uncovered the full diversity of bacterial TIR-based antiviral immune signaling, massively expanded the known diversity of Thoeris systems, and revealed conservation of TIR-derived immune signals across the tree of life.

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

📢 We have multiple open PhD positions to study bacterial immune systems using cutting-edge cryo-EM, microbiology, and biochemistry in our group! Join us and uncover how bacterial defenses eliminate predators and engineer next-gen biotech tools.

🔥 Apply by Jan 8, 2026

Details: phd.pages.ista.ac.at

Happy December!

Join #MVIF 44 – we will discuss diverse #microbiome topics:
human urinary, gut, oral and nasal microbiomes,
extreme environments, and
a new sequence alignment tool.

Are you a postdoc or 4-5th year grad student working on any problem in environmental microbiology and are interested in giving a virtual seminar (via zoom) on your hard work to a crowd of interested researchers at Montana State's Thermal Biology Institute in spring? Email/DM me!

Widespread and intron-rich mirusviruses are predicted to reproduce in nuclei of unicellular eukaryotes - Nature Microbiology Environmental metagenomic explorations show that Mirusviricota lineages lack essential replication and transcription genes and contain spliceosomal introns, suggesting nuclear reproduction.

Check out our latest paper on mirusviruses, one of the most remarkable new groups of protist viruses - extremely diverse, carry lots of spliceosomal introns (including new homing introns) and are at the evolutionary crossroads between tailed phages and herpesviruses! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Officially out!

Structural basis of T-loop–independent recognition and activation of CDKs by the CDK-activating kinase Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) are prototypical regulators of the cell cycle. The CDK-activating kinase (CAK) acts as a master regulator of CDK activity by catalyzing the activating phosphorylation o...

Now out in Science! Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) are key regulators of the cell cycle. In @vcushing.bsky.social's magnum opus, we use #cryoEM to figure out how the CDK-activating kinase recognises CDKs to fully activate them - a key step in cell cycle control.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

omicsomics.blogspot.com/2025/10/pacb... $300 LongRead personal genome via PacBio

Most plasmids described in E. coli are small compared to the megaplasmids we identified here! Check out the preprint if you want to learn about these mysterious large elements and their potential functions 🧬. I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to work on this in @banfieldlab.bsky.social

A miniature CRISPR–Cas10 enzyme confers immunity by inhibitory signalling - Nature Panoptes, an anti-phage defence system against virus-mediated immune suppression, is revealed.

Now online at @nature.com we show how the Panoptes defense system protects against viruses that attempt immune evasion - and expands our understanding of the role of oligonucleotides in immunity.

Check out this work co-led with @benadler.bsky.social here:

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

New paper online at @nature.com from co-leads @erinedoherty.bsky.social + @benadler.bsky.social !

The Panoptes system uses decoy cyclic nucleotides to defend against phage - Nature The Panoptes antiphage system defends bacteria by detecting phage-encoded counter-defences that sequester cyclic nucleotide signals, triggering membrane disruption and highlighting a broader strategy of sensing immune evasion through second-messenger surveillance.

Our story describing the Panoptes bacterial immune defense system is now finally peer-reviewed and published today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A miniature CRISPR–Cas10 enzyme confers immunity by inhibitory signalling - Nature Panoptes, an anti-phage defence system against virus-mediated immune suppression, is revealed.

Today in @nature.com , we highlight how a cousin of CRISPR-Cas10, mCpol, establishes an evolutionary trap in anti-phage immune systems.

Check out @erinedoherty.bsky.social and my work from @doudna-lab.bsky.social lab here:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Microbiology and Immunology – Faculty Position (Ladder Rank) – Assistant Professor University of California, San Francisco is hiring. Apply now!

Our Department of Microbiology & Immunology at UCSF is running a faculty search this year for a new Assistant Professor! Please see the ad below for details. Searching for a great colleague, mentor, and scientist!
aprecruit.ucsf.edu/JPF05807

Join us tomorrow if you can. Link below to register.

New blog post!

metaMDBG (@gaetanbenoit.bsky.social) and Myloasm (@jimshaw.bsky.social) have had recent releases, so I updated the benchmarks from the Autocycler paper:
rrwick.github.io/2025/09/23/a...

Both tools improved considerably! Time to update your conda environments 😄

Assistant Professor Plant-Microbe Interactions We seek a creative, collaborative, and visionary plant biologist to establish an internationally recognized research program at the forefront of plant-microbe interactions aimed at understanding how t...

The Department of Biology at Colorado State University is hiring an Assistant Professor in the area of plant-microbe interactions! Please spread the word!

jobs.colostate.edu/postings/165...

❤️❤️❤️ CSU. Fort Collins is a lovely place to live, and students / faculty are awesome. I should know, I taught there for 15 years! Apply!

This is the dept where I got my PhD! Hiring for microbiology!

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...

🦠Exciting PhD opportunity @ ETH Zürich!
Our Environmental Microbiology group is looking for a motivated student to study microbial processes in peatland restoration — from fieldwork to metagenomics and lab experiments.

🗓 Start: Spring 2026
⏳ Deadline: 3 Oct 2025
👉 Apply: lnkd.in/eSPiy6vQ
Please 🔁

Genomic and physiological characterization of 'Candidatus Methylocystis sumavensis', a novel acid-tolerant methanotroph from peatland Methanotrophic bacteria in peatlands mitigate emissions of methane (CH4), a potent greenhouse gas. Yet, the identity, physiology, and adaptive traits of methanotrophs inhabiting acidic peatlands are s...

📢 🦠 A new methanotroph from Czech peat! Through an effort led by PhD student in my group Justus Nweze we isolated and describe a new CH4-muncher. Potential for a flexible (annaerobic) metabolisms and cool pH adaptations.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#microbesky #microbiomesky

A widespread family of viral sponge proteins reveals specific inhibition of nucleotide signals in anti-phage defense Chang et al. discover anti-CBASS 4 (Acb4), a family of viral sponges that inhibits bacterial immunity by sequestering nucleotide immune signals. Acb4 homologs in phages that infect hosts across all ma...

The beautiful, ever-expanding universe of viral proteins targeting nucleotide immune signals!

Paper by @reneechang.bsky.social in @cp-molcell.bsky.social on a nucleotide sponge www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

and preprint by @doudna-lab.bsky.social on viral nucleases www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New pre-print from Doudna lab members @erinedoherty.bsky.social & @jnoms.bsky.social ✨

Here we explore how recurrent adaptation of a single anti-defense protein fold enables evasion of distinct immune systems.

At the request of @bradleyph.bsky.social, we have now added the Bacterial and Archaeal trees (credit to @aroneys.bsky.social) used to infer the GlobDB taxonomy to the website globdb.org

Feel free to reach out if there's other resources you'd like to see added. No promises, but happy to chat 🖥️🧬🦠

Does sequence clustering confound AlphaFold2? Predicting multiple conformational states of proteins represents a significant open challenge in structural biology. Increasingly many methods have be…

Does sequence clustering confound AlphaFold2?
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... From @hkws.bsky.social

Caliditerrarchaeota, a new sister to Nanohaloarchaeota, provides insights into the evolution of DPANN halophily The Nanohaloarchaeota are a clade of halophilic symbionts with small cells and genomes. Originally placed within the Euryarchaeota, they are now widely thought to belong to the DPANN archaea. However,...

New preprint up now!

Interested in the evolution of halophily within DPANN archaea we decided to investigate the sister phylum to the Nanohaloarchaeota, GTDB phylum EX4484-52, for which we propose the name Caliditerrarchaeota
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...