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

You also can’t learn to write good papers without writing bad drafts (or bad papers) so write your own outlines, drafts, and papers!

submitted 10 hours ago • 0 comments

New paper out! We discovered a tiny archaeon with the smallest known archaeal genome — only 238 kbp! Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile has almost no recognizable metabolic pathways and may rely heavily on a host to survive. It also represents a novel, deep-branching lineage in the archaeal tree.

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

Check out the pre-print of my main PhD work, Syn57! Together with my incredible co-first authors and a big team we‘ve built a full E. coli genome operating on a 57-codon genetic code! So much hard work, and so much love for everyone who was involved! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Happy birthday SAR11! 35 years old today! uncultured.carinilab.com/p/happy-birt...

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

Upset about federal funding cuts in the US? Want some ideas of what to do? I wrote a long-ish blog post about it here ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com summarizing things I learned meeting with Senate & House aides this week with the @aibsbiology.bsky.social Congressional Visits Day event.

submitted 1 day ago • 7 comments

Deep cuts to EPA, CDC, FDA, NIH, NSF, NOAA, USDA, education & more will damage health and shorten life spans, especially w/ cuts to healthcare for those w/ limited means. Is this the goal, to reduce "entitlements" by killing people? Well, it sure won't make the wealthy any more comfortable.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Ugh Friday morning massacre: NSF 15% IDC www.nsf.gov/policies/doc...

submitted 1 day 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 2 days ago • 3 comments

Last week, the govt dismissed 400 researchers working on the US National Climate Assessment. I was one of them. Today, @agu.org & @ametsoc.org announced they are joining forces to sustain the momentum. It's not a replacement, it's a reminder that science is unstoppable. news.agu.org/press-releas...

submitted 1 day ago • 22 comments

"That telomere phages are so prevalent means that they are a selective force, one that we know little about. We now want to understand how the telomere-toxin is secreted and also understand how this ‘telocin’ wheedles its way into unsuspecting bacterial neighbors” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

submitted 2 days ago • 7 comments

Time to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10

submitted 2 days ago • 18 comments

New @science.org An innovative way to deliver drugs to the gut at low doses to suppress inflammation www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

Anyway re this whole apparent shift in HHS's vaccine priorities to try to make universal vaccines using beta-propiolactone (BPL)... some wonky thoughts 🧵

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

Do people in the same household share strains when they have the same species? How many cells transmit when a strain is shared? Can strain composition be dynamic when species composition is stable? We answer these and related questions for the facial skin microbiome in our latest paper. 🧵[1/10]

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

100 days ago, we couldn't envision the toll of death and suffering this man would cause. Now scientists are estimating the body count, the new rise of infectious diseases once subdued. My latest for The Nation. @mathewkiang.com @nathanlo.bsky.social www.thenation.com/article/poli...

submitted 2 days ago • 9 comments

The devastating blows to American science during Trump's first 100 days, in numbers. And the end is nowhere in sight. www.science.org/content/arti...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

A truly horrible decision that will end a lot of crucially important science. This pulls the rug out from under brilliant international researchers who accomplish so, so much on comparatively tiny budgets working on critical global diseases. Another absolutely disastrous and backwards decision.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

What I find a tad more stressful is that I think we in academia all at heart know this, but we haven’t found a way to talk about it. And if we’re going to respond and plan we have to talk about it.

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

People have occasionally found microbes that can actually break carbon-fluorine bonds, as unlikely as that may seem. What's even more surprising is that we have some of them in our own intestinal flora!

submitted 3 days ago • 5 comments

Generation of a recombinant mimivirus by direct transfection of a PCR amplicon | bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.28.651011v1?rss=1

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Extracting @NCBI SRA files with fasterq-dump can require 17x the size of the accession while decompressing. Our new tool xsra extracts sequences at 5x throughput with significantly less disk usage, built-in compression, and optional BINSEQ outputs github.com/arcInstitute...

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

Just got mine. Totally expected, but it still sucks. Probably the most for all the work that so many of us put in on behalf of US taxpayers that is now wasted and will never come to fruition.

submitted 4 days ago • 202 comments

“Cutting federal funding for scientific research could cause long-run economic damage equivalent to a major recession. A 50% reduction would lower GDP 7.6%. A 75% cut would reduce it 11.3% — a larger decline than in any recession since the Great Depression. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/b...

submitted 3 days ago • 6 comments

Microbial model communities reveal widespread auxotrophies in abundant bacteria Our results highlight the value of cultivating microorganisms in groups to cultivate: 1) abundant microorganisms tinyurl.com/miintmodcom

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

Excited to share new research led by our very own @lingdong-shi.bsky.social showing that many archaeal 23S rRNAs are circularized in active ribosomes. Check out the preprint below.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Banfield lab has landed on bsky: 😎👋

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

This is an illegal act by the Trump administration. It's time for consequences, folks.

submitted 4 days ago • 11 comments

The LLM-r/Changemyview field exp, beyond the ethical issues, has a big stats issue: excluding posts that got deleted, which itself may influenced by treatment. This conditioning on a post-treatment variable violates random assignment & means you can't make causal inferences about treatment effects

submitted 5 days ago • 4 comments

Pandoravirus -> Pandoravirus HGT event:

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Super thrilled to share our labor of love from the Asian Skin Microbiome Program! We collected >3,500 skin samples, built metagenomic libraries w/ >70 billion reads and >10TB of data to study heterogeneity of the skin microbiome in the general population (200 adults, 18 sites) t.co/ZylbJMpvpw

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

In 100 days in office, US President Donald Trump has destabilized eight decades of government support for science. This has included terminating more than 1,000 grants in areas such as climate change, cancer, and HIV prevention. Will US science survive Trump 2.0? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

submitted 4 days ago • 8 comments

Here we share thoughts on next-gen cultivation: rdcu.be/ejPSb. Hope it helps 😄 Was fun to write with great colleagues @lisamaierlab.bsky.social @jselkrig.bsky.social @baerboletta.bsky.social @typaslab.bsky.social @mmmicrobiomelab.bsky.social @leibniz-dsmz.bsky.social @westermannlab.bsky.social

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Aww look at these trend setters in #microbiology! Interested in the large genome structural variation that isn't accounted for in short read #sequencing & consequences these have, read the latest review by our @emmabeansworth.bsky.social & @gemma-langridge.bsky.social #academicsky #academicchatter

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

A bacteriophage-conditional mouse model reveals the impact of phages within a conventionally colonized gut microbiota Interesting: Acriflavine inhibits bacteriophage replication, so they use it to develop a phage-depleted mouse microbiome model. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Earlier this month the XFL variant was defined, setting a new benchmark in SARS-CoV-2 evolution: a "quadruple-recombinant", meaning it’s evolutionary arc includes 3 recombinant ancestors. It’s a stark example of how we are giving this virus every possible opportunity to evolve. #COVID19 #XFL 🧵

submitted 5 days ago • 4 comments

We just announced the PIVOT and BRIDGE award funds, as well as enhanced university services to help researchers at Hopkins in these difficult times. On and forward! Read about these here: research.jhu.edu/jhu-research...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Super excited to share a new preprint from our lab on design of small-molecule binding proteins using neural networks! The paper has a bit of everything. A new graph neural network, new design algorithms, and experimental validation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵🧪

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

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

submitted 6 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 5 days ago • 3 comments

Proud to announce a new publication from the lab: EvoWeaver: large-scale prediction of gene functional associations from coevolutionary signals www.nature.com/articles/s41...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments