Michelle Clay, PhD

Grad school was a hot minute ago, but I used Spoonflower at the time and thought they were great!

Stop by to chat about your research goals and learn more about how we can help.

Help me out and take some taffy and a notebook - I do NOT want to lug it on my return flight! 😮‍💨

Don't have time to meet now? You can email questions to scientists@seqcoast.com, or get a quote on our website.

We'd be delighted to work with you on your next big genomics project! 🧬

SeqCoast Genomics vendor table, staffed by co-founders Thom Novak and Michelle Clay

We're sponsoring the University of Maryland's Molecular and Cellular Biology Department Retreat! Visit our table to:

• Grab saltwater taffy and a notebook!
• Ask about prepaid Insights Vouchers to preserve spending power of expiring grant funds
• Get sequencing advice for your next big project

FWIW, we send nearly all our sequencing to @seqcoast.bsky.social and have never been disappointed. Great work!

New in JB: Conaway, Hogan et al. link QS and phosphate metabolism in P. aeruginosa, with implications of pathogenesis.
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
@asm.org #JBacteriology

Great afternoon with friends at @seqcoast.bsky.social esp @microbigal.bsky.social

Our business is growing and sequencing and analysis services are better and more diverse than ever.

Delighted they sponsored the best GRC, full stop!

Consistent with so much of what I’ve heard and observed. Private funders don’t want to pay to keep people employed & freezers running – they take for granted that they can just piggyback off of those things being federally subsidized, & just cover relatively minor expenses like “reagents”

The latest publication from our lab!

The famous "glomalin" from arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi is not a protein but a polysaccharide from AM fungi, so we renamed it "glomalose". Glomalin-related proteins are bacterial proteins stuck in this glomalose.
nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The microbiome of the human facial skin is unique compared to that of other hominids | mSystems Understanding how and why human skin bacteria differ from our closest animal relatives provides crucial insights into human evolution and health. While we have known that human facial skin hosts disti...

Our work on the facial skin microbiome of non-human primates is out in mSystems!

We show there is no close relative of Cutibacterium on the faces of gorillas and chimps at the Lincoln Park Zoo, furthering the mysterious origin of the dominant human skin colonizer.

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

This study was:
-done by immigrant scientists, who are now being turned away from the United States by the Trump regime,
-funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, which is being defunded and purged by the Trump regime
-hosted at a public university experiencing vast Trump regime funding freezes

Great thread. Conducting placebo-controlled trials of items known to be relatively safe and effective is unethical.

I got hit by some rather sudden and extreme financial hardship so if anyone is in need of remote wetlab contract research, strictly BSL1, do let me know. Currently scrambling for gigs.

Plant, Bacterial, Archaeal Non-model Bioeng
Custom Lab Hardware
Turn Key Genetic Design

Please repost for reach 💚

Excited to share that our story on S. aureus antagonism by Malassezia is live today in Current Biology! The paper has changed a lot since the preprint with the very exciting addition of having identified the antimicrobial effector generated by M. sympodialis.

authors.elsevier.com/c/1kwzj3QW8S...

US honeybee deaths hit record high as scientists scramble to find main cause US Department of Agriculture calls in university to help study decline as Trump administration staff cuts sting

every story about mass pollinator die-off leads with "this is a mystery, what could cause this" and then ten paragraphs down it's like "oh yeah we're spraying all the bugs with poison, the poison designed to kill bugs"

Here's a similar one that is still available. That's how it works. www.etsy.com/listing/1879...

Blue watercolor grid of mitosis images

This image was mysteriously super popular on another platform this month. I already sold the painting, so an art friend was like "make a limited edition print, just this once!" 🤦

I'm sure y'all are fucking tired of me but one thing I wanna say upfront is that I am brainstorming on here how to talk about what we as academic scientists and experts do so that other people in our country can understand what will be lost.

This is an understatement. We have already lost our scientific edge. Mass personnel cuts, lost grant support, gutting of pipeline programs, and the uncertainty about the future has already impacted our competitiveness and future generations of scientists. We just don’t see it yet. But we will.

Just received the email that my recent appointment to a BSC, which was supposed to be until June 2029, was terminated effective immediately.

You want to learn about microbiology from a fantastic lineup of speakers on a beautiful Greek island? PhD students apply now for the @EMBO | @FEBSnews Lecture Course The New Microbiology!
Registration: 1 Apr 2025
Course: 03 – 11 Sep 2025 | Spetses, Greece
meetings.embo.org/event/25-new...

I think the 16S target is important to identify, at least at the outset. Ex: fungi are a part of the microbiome/microbial community, but they aren’t captured by 16S amplicon sequencing.

In my 25 years since high school I’ve seen

1. HIV/AIDS go from death sentence to manageable with drugs

2. Cystic fibrosis go from pretty much an extended death sentence to manageable with drugs

3. Sickle cell go from a horrible disease to (almost maybe) cured by gene therapy

Simply incredible

Promo information for SeqCoast Genomics. Text reads: SeqCoast Genomics Sequence Smarter. Discover More. You're in luck! "We Feel Lucky to Have You" Savings Receive 17% off SeqCoast services on orders greater than $1,000. Email scientists@seqcoast.com for the promo code! Place order by Pi day (3/14) Deliver samples by St. Paddy's Day (3/17) Receive data by April 1st (no. joke!) Don't leave your data quality up to chance!

It's not too late to cash in on your good luck! ☘️💰🧬

See details below to save on your next NGS project:

a statue of a hippopotamus with its mouth open and teeth showing . Alt: A hippo being tossed a watermelon, which it crushes in its massive jaws.

I have been doing entirely too much earnest posting about deep things recently, I need to do a proper thread about hippo testicles or something just to keep myself sane.

Oh by the way hippos have migratory testicles.

Hundreds of research grants at Columbia canceled following Trump edict, administrator says The National Institutes of Health is terminating 232 grants for scientific research at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, according to an email an administrator sent to faculty.

I received one of the 232 NIH grant "terminations" sent to scientists at Columbia last night. My research focuses on improving maternal and child health in the US. Also affected: ongoing clinical trials, research training programs, and research centers that aim to improve the health of Americans.

they’re treating medical research as some kind of favor to bestow, rather than what it is — arduous painstaking and unprofitable work done for all Americans

this will slow Alzheimer’s and other brain research, not help it

in net, patients will suffer

*Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...

I’m thrilled to share my first ever publication, now published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

With mentorship from the amazing @ksxue.bsky.social, I looked at how the outcomes of species introductions to microbial communities are influenced by the number of introduced microbes.

Very much this.