Most of the academic research workforce is performance managed to the max, simply by the nature of the funding landscape.
Flexibility is the only perk we have, don’t rip it from us because HR depts don’t understand the nature of the work.
Very happy to see our microphysiological human mini-bladder published! 🎉
We show how urine composition affects tissue health and thus invasivness of UPEC, and how cell wall-deficient UPEC from the tissue reactive UTIs. 🦠
Check it out here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#UTISky
This post was inspired by @ivalaine.bsky.social who got me onto this fascinating topic in the scientific literature
tinyurl.com/4r4jc3sz
doi.org/10.1136/bmjo...
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
doi.org/10.1136/bmjo...
doi.org/10.1007/s123...
doi.org/10.1016/j.ec...
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Lookback meme. Woman in red dress with caption: "Antibiotics". Man in blue shirt checking out woman in red dress captioned: "The public". Partner of man in blue shirt glaring at man who is checking out woman in red dress, captioned: "Cold/flu symptoms"
Surveyed misconceptions around #AntibioticResistance are fascinating:
• 66% believe they aren't at risk of resistance when taking antibiotics
• ~70% assume ‘antibiotic resistance’ refers to the body gaining resistance
• ~25% expect antibiotics for viral infections
#AMR #SciComm
Sources below:
Amazing vis in this thread. And science too!
Have you wondered if some E. clones are so successful because of their plasmids? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A combination of bioinf and lab work showed that some plasmids have coexisted for centuries, and that a specific colicin gene is able to kill other clones paving their way for success!
Looking forward to sharing our recent work on population metabolism of #klebsiella pneumoniae this week.
Join me to learn about metabolic diversity within species, featuring work by @bananabenana.bsky.social @helena-bethany.bsky.social and a sneak peak at our latest from @kalanip.bsky.social
See you this Wedneday 😀
Join us for an evening of cutting-edge microbiology, industry insights, and great conversation!
📅 Wednesday, 25 February 2026
⏰ 6:00–7:30pm
📍 The Burrow (Beer Garden Room), West End
🍕 Free pizza provided!
👉 Register via the QR code on the poster.
Thanks, these are excellent resources.
Cool fact. Could you give a link to that? Sounds handy.
What the papers I cited are saying is people remember 'antibiotic resistance' over other terms. If we want to engage with the public/policymakers, it helps to use words they will understand/remember.
Agree that better education is required.
Resistance is a legitimately solvable problem, but messaging is key.
Consider how agriculture has used euphemistic double-speak by calling antibiotics 'growth promoters'.
If we can't get the public, politicians or over-prescribing GPs to understand this, then expect resistance trends to continue
The 'but I like this meme'. Top panel: 'The public' referring to Jeremy Clarkson standing between two cars. The red car on the right says: 'Antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Jeremy says: "This is brilliant" Bottom panel: Jeremy points to the silver car which is captioned: 'Antibiotic resistance' and says: "But I like this"
The language we use in science is important.
Repeatedly, the public understands 'antibiotic resistance' over 'antimicrobial resistance'
Clarity > correctness. #AMR will continue until messaging improves
#AntibioticResistance #SciComm
www.nature.com/articles/s43...
www.nature.com/articles/s43...
🚨 New pre-print! 🚨 In the largest study of its kind to-date, we investigate the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms driving within-patient evolution of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Read here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... , and follow along with this thread, discussing our findings (1/21)
We will have the pleasure to have Dr. Kelly Wyres in our next webinar talking about:
👉 Metabolic modelling of Klebsiella pneumoniae and strain diversity
When: 25.02.206 at 10h00 CET
Registration: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
@kelwyres.bsky.social
@escmid.bsky.social
Do you think transporters in E. coli contribute to metabolite release? No? Explore the effect of 66 different transporter knockout mutations on the exometabolome dynamics of ~300 metabolites yourself: keio.unil.ch
Teaser: Increased proline in ΔputP
#microsky #MEvoSky
I usually accept most requests, but I think getting paid would help when motivation to accept is low. For-profit journals should pay reviewers. Non-profit journals should offer publishing discounts.
Anti-LLM screening would need to be implemented as well.
How would you design a *multithreaded*, *concurrent* & *dynamic* hash table if you are focused specifically on common k-mer workloads, where streaming query & insertion are common? Jamshed, Prashant and I explore this in kache-hash, a cache-friendly k-mer hash table!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Figure 3F from https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.12.705432v1. This shows a network of environmental meta-transcriptomics and TraDIS knockout results. Points are coloured based on gene function. Genes which are identified both by meta-t and TraDIS were associaetd with amino acid metabolism, nucleotide metabolism, biofilm and other.
What #Ecoli 🦠 genes enable environmental persistence?
Incredibly layered work in this study, spanning:
- Environmental meta-transcriptomics 📊
- Isolate culturing 🧫
- #metabolism ♻️
- Mouse survivability experiments 🐁
- TraDIS 🧬
- Isogenic mutant validation ∆
🧪
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🎉 Almost 3 months to go!
🧬 Join us at the TARGetAMR Annual Conference 2026, 14–15 May, Birmingham
🔎 Collaborate, learn & lead the fight against AMR.
👉 Register today: www.targetamr.org.uk/now-open-cal...
#TARGetAMR26
New research article
The effect of pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine on nasopharyngeal colonisation following human infection challenge with serotype 3 and serotype 6B (PREVENTING PNEUMO 2)
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
#IDSky #ClinMicro #OpenAccess #OA
This paper is absolutely stunning btw
academic.oup.com/ismej/articl...
Mixotricha paradoxa "is composed of five different organisms: three bacterial ectosymbionts on its surface for locomotion and at least one endosymbiont lives inside to...digest cellulose in wood to produce acetate for its host(s)"
Single-celled eukaryotes are wild
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixotri...
✨If you have a story you would like to share with the community, please submit an abstract by Feb 16. ✨
Genomic analysis of Klebsiella pneumoniae causing community-acquired respiratory deaths among Zambian infants and children using targeted RNA-probe hybridization-capture metagenomics
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
This behaviour is just going to embolden for-profit journals to move entirely to LLM-based reviews.
Why do journals need 'reviewers' to unethically upload other people's IP to an LLM when they can do it themselves and rake in the 💰?
Cringe self-own IMO
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Peer review is often opaque and confusing. @elife.bsky.social worked to change that.
In a new preprint, we show how eLife’s Publish, Review, Curate model makes it possible to evaluate AI-generated reviews (with OpenEval) against human peer review. w/ @lauraluebbert.com and @lpachter.bsky.social
Our report on the current state of preprinting in the life sciences is out!
Read it here: zenodo.org/records/1... & watch our video on the key data: youtu.be/G_mmmkuBua8
#preprints #scicomm #academicsky
FoldMason is out now in @science.org. It generates accurate multiple structure alignments for thousands of protein structures in seconds. Great work by Cameron L. M. Gilchrist and @milot.bsky.social.
📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
🌐 search.foldseek.com/foldmason
💾 github.com/steineggerla...
This is the sort of strategic planning that should go into #vaccine design 💉
They analysed 1,930 #Klebsiella pneumoniae 🦠🧫🧬 neonate blood isolates from 13 countries and estimate that 20 antigens 🧪 could cover 72.9% of all infections for 5–10 years
#IDSky #EpiSky
journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...
