bjesseshapiro.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Montreal is a city with super hot summers, stupid cold winters, and a gigantic hill in the middle of the city, and still it has an amazing network that makes biking fun, convenient, and easy It really is a question of political will

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

🧵5 Top Free Alternatives to BioRender for Scientific Illustrations! These five websites offer free scientific illustrations for biologists. Great for presentations, research papers and other research communication needs. Save and share the post!

submitted 2 days ago • 33 comments

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

submitted 2 days ago • 138 comments

This is pretty cool -- our preprint got magically reviewed! Thanks to the reviewers for constructive comments. We've actually just finished addressing reviews for a journal so an updated preprint should drop soon...😎

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

The goal of biomedical research is not just to help and save those who are already seen as healthy, but to protect the vulnerable as their lives matter too.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Officially published! 🧬🦠 What if more phages didn't mean more death? We show that even strictly lytic phages can stabilize host populations via persistent, episomal infections (often referred to as pseudolysogeny). It's time to move beyond the lysis/lysogeny binary. #phagesky #microsky

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Great collaboration with clinical colleagues on a multi-species, multi-plasmid NDM outbreak across several hospitals around Liverpool (UK), highlighting relevance of species-specific but also -agnostic AMR monitoring. 🧬🖥️ 🦠🧫 🧪 #IDSky #MicroSky #Bioinformatics #MedSky www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

It sounds like an exaggeration but the sum total of the evidence for lab leak is the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a half hour drive from the market where the first cluster of cases were.

submitted 4 days ago • 12 comments

Exactly 50 years ago today, I arrived in Canada from a refugee camp. It was only five years ago that I discovered that a Toronto Star photographer had snapped a picture of me during a stopover of the flight that took my family to Montreal. digitalarchiveontario.ca/objects/2030...

submitted 6 days ago • 9 comments

🧩 PhD Position – Origins of Darwinian Inheritance 🧩 This joint PhD project between the @rug.nl (Rampal Etienne & Martijn Egas) and @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social (Bram van Dijk) explores how simple prebiotic systems could evolve reliable information transfer. Apply here: shorturl.at/WgYMF

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

The McGill SPGH welcomes nominations for the 2025 Paul Farmer Lectureship and Award for Global Health Equity. If you know someone who embodies Dr. Farmer’s vision of a preferential option for the poor in health care you have until June 8 to nominate them. Details at www.mcgill.ca/spgh/about-u...

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Our paper on how integrons are biobanks of novel minimal defense systems is now out www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Two main conclusions on this excellent work led by @eloilittner.bsky.social @baptistedarracq.bsky.social 1/n

submitted 6 days ago • 3 comments

Wonderful cover, and amazing research by Zhang et al. - they used classic Chinese poetry that mentions the Yangtze finless porpoise (724 poems in total!) to estimate the range contraction of the species over the last 1400 years. Such a creative approach to generate truly novel data!

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

The rats have chosen a new pope.

submitted 7 days ago • 19 comments

When things add up: environmental structure and microbial interactions drive antibiotic-resistance plasmid evolution. New paper from the lab, and the third chapter of Lars Zandbergen’s thesis! www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

New EO banning “dangerous gain-of-function” experiments dropped Monday. Allow me to break out my deranged anti-vax kakistocrat translator. Will this improve the safety & security of biological research? Hell yes, because biological research won’t exist anymore!

submitted 8 days ago • 8 comments

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/way....

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Delighted that @asm.org is among the leading societies filing an amicus brief in support of the ACLU suit appealing the unlawful recission of MOSAIC and other grants asm.org/press-releas...

submitted 13 days ago • 3 comments

A very nice example of the use of #metagenomics for diagnosis of rare #infections "Woman's eyesight saved by cutting-edge test after mystery infection" It was "a rare strain of the bacterial infection leptospirosis" #MicroSky www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

We are looking for a great colleague @mcgill.ca Assistant Professor (Tenure Track), Department of Global and Public Health mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill...

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

I talked to Nature about the latest development at NSF, which is a five-alarm fire for American science. The scale of immediate impact is massive. We narrowly escaped this affecting @viralemergence.org for now, but will have to shut down in a few months if this stays. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

submitted 14 days ago • 3 comments

Meanwhile in the civilized regions of North America… It’s vaccination week!

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

The administration has already nerfed picks like Gaetz because they were embarrassed. RFK just said that the MMR vaccine contains aborted fetus debris. Absolutely psychotic. American public health, as an institution, should organize around one clear goal right now: this guy needs to be fired.

submitted 15 days ago • 4 comments

This is like having a NASA director who rejects gravity.

submitted 15 days ago • 7 comments

Code for PopPIPE here: github.com/bacpop/PopPIPE Thanks to some thorough editing in review we ironed out some errors that can arise, made the installation simpler, and added more automated output from the transmission pipline steps

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

#microsky

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

This meeting will be great! Abstract submission open now See you 26-27 Nov in Liverpool microbiologysociety.org/event/societ...

submitted 16 days ago • 2 comments

New preprint with nice detective work by PhD student Khadija Hanga: gain of pOXA MDR plasmid is facilitated by chromosomal mutations affecting OmpF which act synergistically with the plasmid’s carbapenamase to give high level resistance. Led by @mbottery.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment

An awesome position in a super enabling institute. Join us in Kiel!

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

Biofilm architecture determines the dissemination of conjugative plasmids: We measured the spatiotemporal spread of plasmids in biofilms and found that plasmids only spread in some biofilm regions! Collab with lab of @sbigot.bsky.social & Christian Lesterlin www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

Important 🧵 if your research depends on genome assemblies from long (PacBio / ONT) reads. As @merenbey.bsky.social says, these may not be the genomes you are looking for. TLDR: the assemblers are wrong and predict too many small circular contigs.

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

antiSMASH8: The Ocho Manuscript is out! doi.org/10.1093/nar/...

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

As I might have said 27 years ago if there was social media: ANNOUNCING GCUA: General Codon Usage Analysis. I published first version in 1999 & I wrote it in C. The current version is written in python and has a few more bells and whistles, particularly plotly visualizations github.com/mol-evol/gcua

submitted 17 days ago • 3 comments

Check out this fantastic story from @ikinglab.bsky.social group! There's always something cool going on in the mucosa

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

Jay is the lead author on a fascinating paper I was involved in, about how male mimicry by female hummingbirds provides the first example of a type of signaling system that we predicted from theoretical principles over a decade ago. This is infuriating. And I believe it's due to anti-trans bias.

submitted 19 days ago • 11 comments

step one.

submitted 19 days ago • 6 comments

We have a PhD available at our Exeter Cornwall campus in collaboration with the University of Queensland on AMR in agricultural environments tinyurl.com/3m4pkmup the project can be tailored to the student's interests and expertise with an opportunity to spend 6 months in sunny Brisbane!

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

Canadians might be starting to feel complacent that Pierre, the little Trumpist polyp, is not going to be PM, but it's more important than ever to vote and send a message that this shit won't fly. Make this entire brand of politics electorally radioactive.

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

Join the Blokesch lab (@EPFL) as a postdoc in Molecular Microbiology 🤩 Study Vibrio cholerae defense systems (phage/plasmid) in a dynamic, collaborative environment in Lausanne close to Lake Geneva in 🇨🇭! Please visit my lab's webpage for details about the position and how to formally apply.

submitted 20 days ago • 2 comments

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

submitted 20 days ago • 614 comments

Another moment of calm from Oaxaca

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Come join us at @mcgill.ca as an assistant professor in virus-host interactions! Please share widely. mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill...

submitted 21 days ago • 2 comments

If you are interested in microbial #pangenomes, join us at @eseb2025.bsky.social in Barcelona with @bjesseshapiro.bsky.social and @annadewar.bsky.social Only two days left to submit your abstract! eseb2025.com/call-for-abs...

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment