Made it onto bluesky at long last! And with a new review to boot with Solomon Garland, @vickiorr.bsky.social and @jpjhall.bsky.social. Invasive plasmids as ecosystem engineers—from mechanism to application portlandpress.com/essaysbioche... #plasmids
Another recent one from the group out in Elementa: "Assembly-free short-read metagenomic maximum growth rate prediction". You can now use gRodon's metagenomic maximum growth rate prediction directly on short reads (no assembly required)
doi.org/10.1525/elem...
New paper alert!! We just discovered a new filament system that is widespread exclusively within CPR bacteria! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... Short thread below. 🦠🔬🚀
Bacteria and archaea possess an enormous variety of antiviral immune systems that often share homologous proteins and domains. YprA-family helicases a…
www.sciencedirect.com
Microbial maximum growth rates are key parameters in microbially explicit soil biogeochemical models that can also be estimated directly from genomes and metagenomes, therefore enabling model-data syn...
Taxonomic and transcriptional associations between arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and the soil microbiome are maintained under biotic perturbation | ISME Communications | Oxford Academic
The Candidate Phyla Radiation (CPR) represents a bacterial superphylum estimated to include between 15–50% of all bacterial species, yet CPR bacteria remain challenging to culture and have been primar...
Interested in natural products? We just published an article on hybrid peptide-polyketide-specialized lipids and describe the chitinimines, a new family of amphiphilic metabolites. Read it open access in JACS Au: doi.org/10.1021/jacs...
JL Weissman
Very happy to share this preview article written by my postdoc Danny on exciting recent work from @ostermanilya.bsky.social and @soreklab.bsky.social. New bacterial immunity, phage countermeasures, and a double pun combo in the title.
Debnath Ghosal
Polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) synthase enzymes are best known for their role in membrane lipid biosynthesis in marine psychrophilic bacteria but have also evolved to assemble specialized lipid-con...
Our newest out in ISME J showing that microbial copiotrophic traits decline across temperature gradients even as growth rates increase. TLDR; genomic patterns of translation optimization like CUB sometimes better predict ecological strategy than do growth rates themselves.
Sofya Garushyants
Jean-Michel Ané
Jack Bravo
Mitja M. Zdouc
JL Weissman
Ranked placement of phage predation as a determinant of dehydration severity among cholera patients in Bangladesh
✅ Just Accepted
🔗 https://bit.ly/3Q2eDGi
NAD to the bone: How bacteria put phages under aRES-t … and how phages fight back
Preview of work IDing aRES, bacterial proteins that deplete cellular NAD+, generating products that cannot be utilized by phage NAD+ regeneration pathways
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
The Journal of Infectious Diseases
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) structure soil microbiomes and support plant growth. However, the stability of established AMF-microbiome interactions to biotic perturbation by introduced microbial inocula is unclear. We investigated how AMF shape soil microbial communities and transcriptional activity when challenged by the introduction of foreign microbial inocula. Using established maize-AMF mesocosms, we introduced microbial communities from forest and agricultural soils and assessed taxonomic composition and metatranscriptomic profiles. Despite clear differences between introduced inocula, neither microbiome treatment altered resident microbial community composition or transcriptional profiles. Instead, AMF exerted a strong and consistent influence on microbial gene expression and bacterial taxa abundances, with effects scaling quantitatively with the degree of mycorrhizal colonisation. Co-expression analyses revealed coordinated transcription among plant, AMF, and microbial genes, suggesting multi-kingdom interactions. Overall, we find AMF drive the structure of soil microbial communities, with biotic perturbation exerting limited influence under the conditions tested.
Genomic Traits Associated with Copiotrophy Decouple from Maximum Growth Rate Predictions Along Temperature Gradients academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc... #jcampubs
In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Osterman et al. discover aRES, a new family
of bacterial immune proteins that deplete cellular NAD+, generating cleavage products
that cannot be utilized by canon...
