Great @imibirmingham.bsky.social seminar by the brilliant @josebengoechea.bsky.social who has uncovered another cool and important mechanisms in Klebsiella pneumoniae virulence (no spoilers because unpublished data)
๐ฌ New work from the Mazel Lab engineers programmable conjugative plasmids to selectively target MDR bacteria and the resistance plasmid pOXA-48, blocking its spread in complex communities.
โ๏ธ @amazeld.bsky.social & coll. @pasteur.fr
๐ shorturl.at/GZdJu
#MicroSky #AntibioticResistance #Conjugation
I am rather worried that this government not only will actively fail UK universities but also screw over one of the gems of UK economy - science and life science, particularly.
Will UKRI's funding buckets shore up UK research? share.google/B92vQ7E6nEOK...
๐LSHTM offers #scholarships to tackle barriers to education for students from all backgrounds.
Check out our First and Next Generation Scholarships for home fee students & those interested in distance learning MSc programmes.
Apply by 27 March 2026๐ www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/fees-a...
Virtual webinar on safe microbiome perturbations focusing on gut microbiome and probiotics, scheduled for 26 February 2026.
Join us this Thursday for our online seminar series, Safe Microbiome Perturbations. Featuring a live discussion on 'Gut Microbiome and Probiotics.' Register now: https://microb.io/3OBhVPs
#GutMicrobiome #WebinarSeries
Insights into how #Staph aureus adapts to the bovine host by unlocking nutrients from the dairy niche. Great work by Amy Pickering, Jamie Gorzynski and others in the group. Bacterial metabolic remodeling by convergent evolution after a host switch.|Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
On this plus side, the number of billionaires in the UK rose from 15 in 1990 to 165 in 2024.
Huzzah!
A perfect example of how to damage irreversibly a funding system that was eorking in a reasonable manner. Instead of increasing responsive mode funding, the option chosen is centralization of the budget on UKRI to deliver....nothing...while damaging ECRs.
#WeekendRead #MicrobiotaPower! Tsai, @diehllab.bsky.social &co show @ Science Immunology that E. coli flagellin is recognized by TLR5 on intestinal epithelial stem cells to recruit gut protective CCR2+ monocyte-derived macrophages, decreasing colitis! #IBDs doi.org/10.1126/sciimmunol.adr4057
Milestone of the lab...10000 strains in our collection!
#Klebsiella infections are a serious & growing #PublicHealth threat
For #AntimicrobialAwarenessWeek, @josebengoechea.bsky.social discusses the dangers of bacterial infections, antimicrobial resistance & the global efforts to tackle it. @lshtmamrcentre.bsky.social
www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/e...
For anyone interested in doing a PhD at the interface of microbiology and immunology focusing on how AMR pathogens subvert host defenses...you may consider applying to our MRC LID DTP project in which we will explore how Klebsiella hijacks the immune checkpoint PD-L1 mrc-lid.lshtm.ac.uk/apply/
So happy to share this! Bacteriocins were first discovered over 100 years ago, but what do they actually do? We look at >1000 bacteriocin plasmids and find links to virulence and antimicrobial resistance, and frequent bacteriocin sharing in Enterobacteriaceae.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Government has published one of those quiet but important documents that might get overlooked as it is not 'newsy'. The headline finding is that ยฃ1 of public R&D investment generates ยฃ8 in net economic benefits for the UK over the long term
www.gov.uk/government/p...
What makes PhD students happy? Good supervision www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Genome-wide screen to identify Escherichia coli gene knockouts hypersensitive to trimethoprim and chloramphenicol. Top left: Schematic showing the screening strategy for identifying hypersensitive gene knockouts from the Keio mutant library. All mutants were cultured in LB and LB supplemented with trimethoprim (TMP) and chloramphenicol (CMP) at their respective IC50s. Top right: Distribution of drug-susceptibilities of Keio mutants grown in indicated growth media obtained after normalizing the growth of each mutant to wild type (set to 1). MeanโยฑโS.D. derived after fitting each distribution to a Gaussian function are shown. Bottom left: Analysis of gene functional categories for hypersensitive mutants compared with the frequency of genes in each category encoded by E. coli K-12 MG1655. Percentage of the total in each case is provided above each bar. Bottom right: Comparison of hypersensitive mutants identified in the trimethoprim and chloramphenicol screens shown as a Venn diagram. Representative genes from each set are named and gene names are colored by functional categories.
Intrinsic resistance pathways & #ResistanceBreaking. Study shows that inhibiting efflux pumps & cell envelope biogenesis sensitizes #bacteria to #antibiotics, but rapid evolutionary recovery may limit long-term effectiveness of resistance-breaking strategies #AMR @plosbiology.org ๐งช plos.io/4huAtvo
Enhanced virulence and stress tolerance are signatures of epidemiologically successful Shigella sonnei
@sydneylmiles.bsky.social @katholt.bsky.social
๐to transformative collaborative effort
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New paper with my (amazing) friend and mentor @jrpenades.bsky.social
Really looking forward to see what plasmid aficionados think of this one!!
With @asantoslopez.bsky.social @wfigueroac3.bsky.social Akshay Sabins and others
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
#WHO report shows rising #antibiotic resistance in common bacteria
@katholt.bsky.social & @josebengoechea.bsky.social explain resistance worryingly high in #Klebsiella & E.coli as 1 in 6 lab-confirmed #bacterial infections in 2023 shown resistant to antibiotics.
www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/n...
My nose must be riddled with S. aureus then ๐ซ
๐๐ญ๐ฆ๐ฃ๐ด๐ช๐ฆ๐ญ๐ญ๐ข ๐ฑ๐ฏ๐ฆ๐ถ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฏ๐ช๐ข๐ฆ is a Gram-negative, non-motile, straight rod-shaped bacterium that can divide rapidly, with some strains having a median doubling time of < 30 min, forming biofilms that interfere with both antibiotic and immune clearance
What an incredible week for @julielebris.bsky.social with one published ms in @asm.org #mBio on #capsule phenotypic heterogeneity & a preprint on the modular evolution of a highly exchangeable locus โฉ๏ธcapsule ๐
All her hard work is paying off!
#ProudPI
#microsky @klebclub.bsky.social
Check her ๐งต๐๐ป
Cool work Lindsay, congrats.
#NewResearch
This study uses Salmonella strains genetically engineered to express minimal effector subsets and mass cytometry to characterise infection of the spleen, revealing bottlenecks overcome by these effectors
#MicroSky
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A good way to think about institutional research culture!
Good opportunity here to work with a super talented new PI.
Maybe I am being grumpy, but can people please stop using poorly curated databases of antibiotic resistance genes (I am looking at you, DeepARG) on shotgun metagenomic data and then present these results without any reflection on their validity, or shortcomings of databases?
Schematic overview of benchmarking approach, highlighting the optimized pipeline.
New in #JClinMicro! An optimized, streamlined nanopore-only workflow for epidemiologic analysis of bacterial pathogens, enabling outbreak analysis with performance comparable to that of Illumina short-read sequencing.
Get the details: asm.social/2wd
Several years of work with several great collaborators, that combined computational biology, molecular microbiology, biochemistry, structural biology and mycology assay culminated in today's publication on discovery of novel bacterial toxins:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
There are half a million cases of invasive non-Typhoidal Salmonella (iNTS) every year and while you might know S. Typhimurim and Enteritidis, you may not have heard of S. Panama ๐ฉ ๐ฉธ ๐งซ ๐ Check out our latest in @lancetmicrobe.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.la... and the ๐งต below to find out more 1/n
