Maxence Lejars

We are excited to share our new preprint: iCLIP3 — an improved protocol for transcriptome-wide mapping of protein–RNA interactions at single-nucleotide resolution.

Interstep compatibility of a model for the prebiotic synthesis of RNA consistent with Hadean natural history | PNAS Models for prebiotic syntheses often have many steps, each separately validated by laboratory experiments. The challenge then asks whether these st...

RNA from scratch.. 💫 Interstep compatibility of a model for the prebiotic synthesis of RNA consistent with Hadean natural history | PNAS
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

U2AF2 controls alternative splicing in speckle-proximal regions in an RS domain-dependent manner Abstract. Splicing factor U2AF2 is known to play a pivotal role for 3′ splice site recognition at an early step of spliceosome assembly. Here, using proxim

Happy to share the last part of my PhD work
academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Unraveling posttranscriptional regulatory networks in phage infection Phages employ sophisticated transcriptional regulatory networks to optimize replication. Recently, Silverman et al. used RIL-seq (RNA interaction by l…

Like bacteria, phages use sRNAs to regulate gene expression! Out today in @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social, @mvelascogomariz.bsky.social and I highlight a recent RIL-seq study from the @saharmelamed.bsky.social lab that looked into posttranscriptional regulation of lambda!

tinyurl.com/lambda-RIL-seq

Check out the Retraction Risk Scanner we built! It evaluates a paper's overall risk by aggregating PubPeer comments, negative discussions on BlueSky and X, and the paper's current retraction status. retractionrisk.com
@retractionwatch.com @altmetric.com

Yet another awesome single-phage paper from Ido Golding's lab #phagesky

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

...the various ways bacteria can use their flagella👇

thx césar for pointing this out 🙏
#MicroSky

Congrats on a really interesting piece of work on (planktonic) bacterial resilience to antibiotics, beautifully reinforcing the point that physiological micro-environment matters in infection modelling. This can undoubtedly be extrapolated to many infections, including #UTI #UTISky #MicroSky

Pleased to share the final version of this behemoth of a paper, now finally published. I guess I can retire now?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

More functional data, many thousands of words removed, and a few other updates from last year's preprint.

New paper from my group in @science.org : "A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesise itself and its complementary strand" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Outstanding work by @edogia.bsky.social

beautiful work by Gaurav Dugar, who taught me my first RNA stuff and even a bit of Campylobacter :)

Starvation-independent alarmone production inhibits translation through GTP depletion in Bacillus

#MicroSky

Bidirectional promoters in Escherichia coli: regulatory rules and implications for gene expression noise Abstract. In prokaryotes, bidirectional promoters are pseudo-symmetrical DNA sequences that stimulate divergent transcription. Ubiquitous, and far more lik

@ewarman.bsky.social has followed up on her discovery of bidirectional promoters in bacteria by defining their basic rules for regulation and links to gene expression noise...

academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

RNase Y mutations and RNA turnover optimization as a possible pathway for ATB tolerance

Evolution and diversity of oxidoreductases involved in redox balance and energy conservation - Nature Ecology & Evolution HORBEC are protein complexes involved in the regulation of redox balance and energy conservation. The authors develop a bioinformatic tool for HORBEC annotation in bacterial and archaeal genomes and r...

Passioned by #bioenergetics? Do not miss our new article on the evolutionary history of oxidoreductases with G. Borrel and @sgribaldo.bsky.social @archaeal.bsky.social @valdeanda.bsky.social @pasteur.fr @cnrs.fr @cnrsbiologie.bsky.social @natecoevo.nature.com (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

Why m⁶A? An RNA surveillance model Dierks and Schwartz discuss the m6A surveillance model, proposing that m6A flags “undesirable” intron-less RNAs (e.g., transposons) for decay. This provides a mechanism to distinguish “legitimate” spliced mRNAs and potentially suppress harmful RNA.

Online Now: Why m⁶A? An RNA surveillance model Online now:

#Microsky

Reposting just for the title!

Integrated fluorescence light microscopy-guided cryo-focused ion beam-milling for in situ montage cryo-ET Nature Protocols, Published online: 30 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41596-025-01284-zA protocol for cryogenic 3D correlative focused ion beam milling using an integrated fluorescence light microscope and montage cryo-ET for nonadherent and adherent mammalian cells, as well as primary Drosophila melanogaster neurons.

New Article! Integrated fluorescence light microscopy-guided cryo-focused ion beam-milling for in situ montage cryo-ET

Combining super-resolution imaging and machine learning, we reveal that C. thermocellum shifts from a microbe-mediated strategy to dynamic cellulosome redistribution during growth on insoluble substrates.
www.life-science-alliance.org/content/9/3/...

Polyamine sensing by nascent ornithine decarboxylase antizyme stimulates decoding of its mRNA - Nature Ornithine decarboxylase (ODC), the rate-limiting enzyme in the biosynthesis of polyamines, is regulated by an antizyme (OAZ). Polyamines induce antizyme expression by promoting ribosomal frame-shiftin...

Many many moons ago I fell in love with science while working on how Polyamines regulate programmed ribosomal frame shifting

www.nature.com/articles/nat...

Time to get back to these fascinating and complex field

Raman spectroscopy can be used to predict cellular physiology and proteome composition in E. coli.

🔗 buff.ly/bcALp6R

“A student joining a lab is often presented with a hypothesis to work on and may see science as a hypothesis-testing endeavor. Many young postdocs have been told that as a PhD student their job was to answer questions—now they have to discover their own unknown unknowns.”

🧫🧪

Large-scale testing of antimicrobial lethality at single-cell resolution predicts mycobacterial infection outcomes - Nature Microbiology Via high-throughput imaging and tracking over 140 million single mycobacteria, the authors show that drug- and strain-specific killing predict treatment outcomes, with potential to improve drug develo...

#microsky

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

Novel estimation of memory in molecular dynamics with extended and comprehensive single-molecule tracking software: FreeTrace Single-molecule tracking (SMT) in live cells reveals how biomolecules explore crowded intracellular environments, yet most tracking software assumes Brownian motion, an approximation that fails when a...

Its been a pleasure to be a part of this work.

Our group, and in particular Junwoo Park, describes a powerful tool to study single-molecule tracking. FreeTrace reconstruct trajectories under fractional Brownian motion, which enabled us to study anomalous diffusion 🔬

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New Microbe Matters!

@relenski.bsky.social traces the legacy of Escherichia coli and how science is evolving to use this model organism in new ways

#microsky

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

RNA-triggered Cas12a3 cleaves tRNA tails to execute bacterial immunity - Nature Cas12a3 nucleases constitute a distinct clade of type V CRISPR–Cas bacterial immune systems that preferentially cleave the 3′ tails of tRNAs after recognition of target RNA to induce growth arres...

#microsky #phagesky #phage defence

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

A 5′-UTR cis-acting RNA element targeted by RNase III is essential for DNA simple sequence repeat-dependent phase variation in Haemophilus influenzae Abstract. Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are insertion-deletion mutational hotspots causing phase variation in bacterial genomes. When located in intergeni

A 5′-UTR cis-acting RNA element targeted by RNase III is essential for DNA simple sequence repeat-dependent phase variation in Haemophilus influenzae

academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

A toxin/antitoxin system targeting the replication sliding-clamp induces competence in Streptococcus pneumoniae Author summary The environment in which bacteria live puts them under a great deal of stress, forcing them to adapt constantly, either temporarily or permanently. Streptococcus pneumoniae, a pathogeni...

Delighted to share a new paper from our lab, a study led by Mathieu Bergé looking at how an endogenous toxin targets replication to induce competence in the pneumococcus. dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...