Leonor García-Bayona

Coolest paper of the year so far!!
I wonder if we'll start seeing more often some convergences or HGT for those genes in the reclassified gut Prevotellaceae in populations with newly industrialized lifestyles (and the associated oxidative stress).

🚨The Yap Lab at Northwestern Univ is looking to fill 2 postdoc positions in 2026 to study aspects of Staphylococcus aureus antibiotic resistance and RNA synthesis-degradation. Please contact Frances Yap at frances.yap@northwestern.edu for details. sites.northwestern.edu/yaplab/. Pls repost #Microsky

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...

We are hiring! If you're interested in exploring the #biogeography of #prokaryotes using #genomics and #metagenomics, are interested in biology and geographic information systems, and are passionate about #OpenScience, this is for you! New PhD and PostDoc positions in my lab at Aalborg University

I know I'm probably using this function all wrong but Gaia/Seqhub really made me cackle today. For your own viewing pleasure, a story in screengrabs 🤣🫣🤖

Fascinating study! A pathogen locked in an evolutionary trade-off with strain antagonism for centuries and HGT has not caused escaping it 🤔

Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨Preprint alert - this is a big one! We transfer the revolutionary power of TnSeq to bacteriophages.

Our HIDEN-SEQ links the "dark matter" genes of your favorite phage to any selectable phenotype, guiding the path from fun observations to molecular mechanisms.

A thread 1/8

Nutrient competition predicts gut microbiome restructuring under drug perturbations @cellcellpress.bsky.social
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... @stanforduniversity.bsky.social

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

The Leading Edge community has been a life-line as I navigate *points to everything*.

Zara was such a shining light of wisdom and warmth. She will be sorely missed, but her legacy will continue in everyone who had the utmost privilege to interact with her.

Apply, apply, apply!!!!

Being a leading edge fellow has been the single best thing for my scientific career.

Zara’s voice and vision was no small part in that.

Apply. Apply. Apply.

Zara Weinberg was a brilliant light both in and out of science. She changed the lives of everyone she interacted and loved for the better. Her legacy will live on through all of us and we will fight for a better world on behalf of her memory.

May we fight each day to build the future Zara imagined. The world lost a genuinely good human but her power to inspire our community will persist 💔

Trade-offs between phage resistance and conjugative ability shape the ecological and evolutionary response of a multidrug resistance plasmid to plasmid-dependent phage Phage therapy is a promising alternative to antibiotics to treat multidrug resistant infections. Plasmid dependent phages (PDPs) are particularly attractive as therapeutics because they can both kill ...

New pre-print www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Plasmid-dependent phage (PDPs) are ubiquitous, but the selective pressures that they impose on plasmids are not well understood. Project led by Daniel Cazares in collaboration with @brockhurstlab.bsky.social!
#phagesky#microsky

I have a fabulous undergrad who has a lot of experience with QIIME2 & using R to analyze microbiome data. She is looking for a job starting in January. Would love to learn more bench and field skills (will be getting some in her last 2 months). Open to academic, industry, government jobs in the US.

Thanks for the kind words!

#phageplasmids

First publication from our lab!

Me cuentas cualquier dato útil que te pueda pasar para montar el lab :)

EXCELENTE!!! Felicitaciones!

Photo of Jaye Gardiner, a Black woman with long curly black hair, wearing dark green glasses and a coral colored sleeveless top, holding an iPad with the words “Jaye’s 1st day” written largely. Underneath it’s written “as an assistant professor 9/2/2025” although that doesn’t come out as clear in the photo.

Hello world! Today’s officially the first day of the lab! It’s an empty space currently only filled with ideas (that I don’t have card access to yet 😂) but I’m excited for the science that will happen here! -JCG

Prehistoric Global Migration of Vanishing Gut Microbes With Humans The gut microbiome is crucial for health and greatly affected by lifestyle. Many microbes common in non-industrialized populations are disappearing or extinct in industrialized populations. Understand...

Excited to share a new preprint w/ the Sonnenberg lab, led by Matt Carter, @zzzhiru.bsky.social & @mattolm.bsky.social. We analyzed the microbiomes of two non-industrialized populations from opposite sides of the globe to try to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of our gut microbiota.

Snails with human-like eyes?!

Published in @natcomms.nature.com, the @planaria1.bsky.social & @accorsi-alice.bsky.social Labs have established apple snails as a novel model for studying vision restoration. They have complex camera-type eyes & the ability to regrow them in 28 days: bit.ly/4mvaxkq

"feels like" is correct because it gives the IMPRESSION of expertise. Just asked GPT5-Thinking a few questions I had asked my PhD students this week... let me tell you, our jobs are safe in this regard LOL
If you believe what it says, it's on you.

Keep in mind that this one only takes their super expensive proprietary tips. Or if people have found a way around it please let me know!

Congrats to postdoc Zhe Zhou on her paper out today in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social showing that gut bacteria cross-feed a common dietary antioxidant to produce energy under anaerobic conditions. Thanks to collaborators Angela Jiang and Xiaofang Jiang at NIH.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Microbiology professor, want to join a slack for microbiology professors, any career stage, diverse career types (pure teaching, med school, R1, community college, pure research fed PIs, ...)

Message me for an invite link if you are interested.

No imposter syndrome, if you are 1% micro, join!