Matt Jago

Starting day two of #MicroEvo25 strong with our first MERMan speaker of the day! An amazing talk by @mattjago.bsky.social about mutational bias in E. coli 🧬

A photo of a homemade poster featuring the Muppet Beaker reading “MAD SCIENTIST.” The Seattle Space Needle is in the background.

Seattle showed up for #standupforscience2025
Great slate of speakers, kudos to the organizers!
🧪 🧬

🎉 Congratulations to Dr Rowan Green, who defended his PhD today! @rowancallumg.bsky.social

These days it’s hard to justify loving space exploration/development (as I deeply do). We have so many terrestrial problems, and space has become the purview of the uber-rich. This is an excellent piece on why it’s still a worthy thing to care about, and we shouldn’t let these people take it from us

Research Associate in Experimental Evolution:Manchester

🚨 Job alert 🚨 — are you interested in understanding how mobile genetic elements and defence systems shape bacterial genome evolution? 🧬 🧪 🧫 🦠 2x 5-year research positions available in experimental evolution @mermanchester.bsky.social Join us! #microsky
www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Are you a #Pseudomonas researcher? Please take our survey and help shape the direction and priority of future pseudomonas.com database development: forms.gle/gTPT6ruf3mqb...
#microsky #idsky

The, what appears to be, scrubbing happening right now at NIH is mind boggling

"Accounting for sex as a biological variable in clinical studies"... gone
"Supporting Women in Biomedical Careers"... gone

🎉 Congratulations to Dr Dolan Evans! Dolan defended his thesis on microbiota of the pre-term infant gut today @mermanchester.bsky.social @lydiabeckeriii.bsky.social

Trump's NIH Freeze Puts Scientific Research at Risk America’s best scientific minds are scrambling to determine the impact of the disruption.

Excellent perspective by @lisamjarvis.bsky.social @bloomberg.com on the deep freeze at NIH

GnT motifs: short nucleotide tracts of ≥8bp that can increase T:A→G:C mutation rates >1000-fold in bacteria Nucleotides across a genome do not mutate at equal frequencies. Instead, specific nucleotide positions can exhibit much higher mutation rates than the genomic average due to their immediate nucleotide...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fascinating talk yesterday by James Horton on #mutation hotspots in bacteria!

They show T bases which follow a run of Gs are highly susceptible to TA>GC transversions.

And the identity of bases *before* the run of Gs influences the mutation rate, 5+ bp away from the mutation locus!

🧪 preprint ⬇️

Thanks Stepan, ditto!

High-throughput method characterizes hundreds of previously unknown antibiotic resistance mutations - Nature Communications Resistance mutations are challenging to characterize because their effects are highly context dependent. Here, authors present a quantitative mutant screening technique that deconstructs how factors l...

📣 New high-throughput method for determining genes involved in #AMR, Quantitative Mutational Scan Sequencing (QMS-Seq)

Special congratulations to MERMAN PhD student Matt @mattjago.bsky.social for his 1st first author paper & supervisor Mato Lagator!
#MicroSky 🦠🧫

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

High-throughput method characterizes hundreds of previously unknown antibiotic resistance mutations - Nature Communications Resistance mutations are challenging to characterize because their effects are highly context dependent. Here, authors present a quantitative mutant screening technique that deconstructs how factors l...

Very excited that my 1st first-author paper has just been published!! We present a novel mutant screening technique that can rapidly identify 100s of antibiotic resistance mutations, while evaluating how likely they are in different genetic backgrounds.

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

🙌 Come and read about how inflammation-like environments shape Pseudomonas adaptation, limiting loss of quorum sensing, through 42-day transfers! 🦠🧪🧫🖥️ 🧬 #ecoevo

🚨PhD Opportunity - please share!🚨

We’re hiring a PhD student to start Sept 2025: how do bacteria ‘tame’ phage parasites, and turn them into deadly Tailocins?

Come join me, @brockhurstlab.bsky.social, Patrick Cai &
@raveentank.bsky.social as we study ZOMBIE PHAGES!

findaphd.com/phds/project...

(BBSRC NWD) Understanding how commensal bacteria modulate the virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa at The University of Manchester on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - (BBSRC NWD) Understanding how commensal bacteria modulate the virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa at The University of Manchester, listed on FindAPhD.com

🚨 PhD opportunity 🚨 The Whelan lab, @jojofoth.bsky.social, & @brockhurstlab.bsky.social are looking for a PhD student w micro experience to study how commensal bacteria modulate the virulence of P. aeruginosa using a fly infection model. More info & link to apply below.

Please spread the word!

We had a great time at the Community Festival this weekend! It was amazing to chat with so many people about all things microbial and see the wonderful creations on our Make Your Own Bacteria stand!