Gianluca Prezza

The paradox of immune systems conservation between prokaryotes and eukaryotes - Nature Reviews Microbiology The widespread prokaryotic immune systems, in particular restriction–modification, CRISPR–Cas and defensive toxin–antitoxin systems, are absent in eukaryotes, whereas relatively rare ones, such as Arg...

Aude Bernheim @audeber.bsky.social and Eugene Koonin discuss one of most interesting questions in the field connecting bacterial and animal immunity!

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

A Bacteroides synthetic biology toolkit to build an in vivo malabsorption biosensor
doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

Can @cultivarium.bsky.social please stop churning out amazing papers please

A genetic platform for a biocementation bacterium https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.05.692644v1

A commensal bacterium secretes effector proteins to establish population heterogeneity in the gut Zagieboylo and colleagues demonstrate that the human commensal Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron secretes two self-targeting proteins that induce heterogeneity within its own population. Differential expre...

An unexpected mechanism for population heterogeneity in the gut microbiome:

www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

How does linguistic bias reinforce privilege in science? #AppEnvMicro Editor in Chief @microgem.bsky.social offers insights and discusses how reviewers can identify it to support a more equitable review process. Read the article: asm.social/2Hp #COPE #PublicationIntegrity

Pretty science and pretty colours is a combination hard to beat

Now that we understood neutral dynamics, we turned to competition. What could cause one plasmid to replicate better than another? Our first thought was transcription might interfere with replication, and it turns out there was a much larger tradeoff than we expected! 7/

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 ...

1/9 Metagenomics lets us read microbiomes in nature without cultivation, but writing (editing) them in their native context is still a major challenge.

Meet MetaEdit: a platform for pathway-scale metagenomic editing inside the gut microbiome. science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In the UK, SUVs accounted for 63% of new sales in 2024.

The proliferation of SUVs is one aspect of “carspreading,” whereby cars are becoming steadily larger over time and with this comes potential harms to health 🧵

www.bmj.com/content/391/...

A new review paper from our lab courtesy of @jazzsynbio.bsky.social is published in Trends in Biotechnology
In this review, we look at the many opportunities for synthetic biology to be used in the research and applications of Holobionts.

The logic of sabotaging the ability to hire trained researchers from abroad while simultaneously sabotaging the ability of US universities to train American researchers is truly baffling.

Translational coupling of neighboring genes in prokaryotes | Journal of Bacteriology Prokaryotic genes are arranged in operons, with functionally related genes often located adjacent to one another (1). There are several ways in which the operonic organization of genes facilitates the...

Check out our new paper: a review of translational coupling, the phenomenon where translation of one prokaryotic gene can promote translation of the gene downstream. We cover the history, and delve into the mechanism, which is still not fully understood. journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Targeted DNA ADP-ribosylation triggers templated repair in bacteria and base mutagenesis in eukaryotes - Nature Biotechnology Append editing of ADP-ribosyl to thymine is used for precise modifications in bacteria and eukaryotes.

🚀 New publication alert! 🚀

We just published in @natbiotech.nature.com:
👉 Targeted DNA ADP-ribosylation triggers templated repair in bacteria and base mutagenesis in eukaryotes
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

I love this diagram

New paper from our lab on synthetic genome work in yeast is out - Iterative SCRaMbLE for Engineering Synthetic Genome Modules and Chromosomes. Exciting project led by Jane (Xinyu) Lu in our group, now online. t.co/0LuGwgAWlA

Photo: HIRI / Luisa Härtig

The Friends of the @helmholtzhzi.bsky.social have awarded Gianluca Prezza the HZI PhD Award for his outstanding doctoral thesis. In #HIRI's @westermannlab.bsky.social, he investigated #sRNAs in the gut bacterium B. theta. 🦠👨🎓 Congrats, @gprezza.bsky.social!
www.helmholtz-hiri.de/en/newsroom/...

Engineering yeast multicellular behaviors via synthetic adhesion and contact signaling By designing synthetic toolkits for contact-based signaling (MARS) and cell-cell adhesion (SATURN), we program yeast to form multicellular structures and perform complex tasks, like building logic cir...

Online now @ Cell is the yeast multicellular engineering paper from Fankang Meng - the fruits of his productive PhD in our group. He developed modular synthetic biology tools to bring multicellular behaviours to yeast - specific adhesion, juxtacrine signalling and more. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

While writing my thesis, I kept wondering why I was putting so much effort in something that "nobody will ever read". Well, someone did and thought it deserved a prize! 🤯
Many thanks to people @westermannlab.bsky.social and Alex in particular for the support, supervision and, eventually, nomination.

Fantastic to see this work published, and the interest it has sparked! A tour de force by Anna Lindell and a interdisciplinary team I was honoured to contribute to.👉 PFAS are already in our environment and bodies, we urgently need ways to mitigate their impact 🧫🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/2

We're hiring for 2 postdocs to work in our lab in London on the newly announced Wellcome Trust SynHG project. If you know people looking to work on big-scale ambitious science like this, please RT and share this with them. Apply by 7/20, interviews in Aug. imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Researchers take first steps to creating synthetic human genomes | Wellcome Scientists are developing technology to create the first synthetic human chromosome. The ability to write large genomes could transform our understanding of health.

It's 25 yrs to the day since the Human Genome Project & Craig Venter declared joint victory in sequencing the human genome - an ideal time for @wellcometrust.bsky.social to annouce their new project, involving our lab, to begin work towards synthesising human genomes. wellcome.org/news/researc...

Excited to share my PhD work!
We used a low-input RNA-seq protocol to dig into what drives cell shape differences in Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron.
Congrats and big thanks to all co-authors 🧫🧬.

Bacteroides Theta-Iota-Omicron is polymorphic already in its name. What are the differences between the morphotypes? We tried to answer this with a combination of mechanical separation of cells based on their shape and an ultra-low input RNA-seq protocol. Paper from @elisebor.bsky.social here 👇

Did you think you needed a promoter for CRISPRa? Think again!

A screenshot of the termination notice showing "Outstanding Investigator Grants"

A screenshot of the termination notice with "This award is terminated effective the date of this award, due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students." highlighted

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a microrobotics platform | PNAS Engineering small autonomous agents capable of operating in the microscale environment remains a key challenge, with current systems still evolving...

“Hello World”

written with living flies 🪰

🧪
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

I'm sorry what 🤯

Awesome, congratulations Eloi!

Here is the Bonsai visualization of a realistic dataset. In contrast to UMAP or PCA, the Bonsai tree accurately reflects the structure in the data. Not only visually, but the
correlations between the true distances and distances in the Bonsai representation are close to 1 for almost all cells.