Ellinor Alseth
Eco-evo with microbes. I happen to like fjords, I think they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. The University of Tromsø. Opinions my own. She/her
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethNew PDRA position with @knightjar.bsky.social @coytelab.bsky.social & me Community assembly processes in soil microbiomes with focus on bioinformatics and computational modelling of data from field and lab experiments www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethLove it when you stumble across a random 1995 paper that could just as well be a 2026 preprint. www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethNew paper out! Here's a puzzle: phototrophy, the ability to use light for energy, is one of life's great innovations. It evolved early and transformed the biosphere. But it evolved 2x. Why not just once, why not more? Our work suggests the answer is priority effects. www.nature.com/articles/s44...
- Reposted by Ellinor Alseth#microsky #phagesky #phage #microbiomesky Molecular adhesins from gut #phages www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethThis is very bad news
- MRC instructs grant review boards to slash funding rates. Boards asked to recommend just three applications for funding, as BBSRC also suspends calls. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethUn poste de Maître de Conférence est ouvert pour rejoindre notre unité à Lyon ! Possibilité de rejoindre mon équipe pour travailler sur: - caractérisation des mécanismes de défense anti-phage - transfert horizontal et interactions entre éléments génétiques mobiles N'hésitez pas à me contacter
- 📢 Recrutement d’un(e) Maître(sses) de conférence en Biochimie générale, spécialité bactériologie moléculaire à MMSB 🔬Recherche *Immunité anti-phages *Réponse au stress, modulation de la croissance bactérienne ✉️ christophe.grangeasse@cnrs.fr 📚Enseignement : Université Lyon I ✉️ patrice.gouet@ibcp.fr
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethIf you have been dreaming of moving to France as an ECR looking to build a long-term research career, now is your chance: @inrae-france.bsky.social yearly hiring for permanent research scientist positions is open: deadline March 5! jobs.inrae.fr/en/open-comp...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethWhy should microbiologists be interested in historical infection remedies, and how can we best investigate them for antimicrobial discovery? Thoroughly enjoyed co-writing this Microbiology Primer with @tosinorababa.bsky.social www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... #MicroSky #Ancientbiotics
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethCome and join our editorial team
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethCool stuff! “A quorum-sensing molecule from Pseudomonas aeruginosa induces defensive multicellularity in a coinfecting pathogen” #microsky
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethNew paper out in @pnas.org, and it made the cover! 👁️ We represent plasmids as circles and mutations as dots, resembling an eye, because in this paper we literally 𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ plasmids evolve. ‼️Check Paula’s 🧵 and the paper👇 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘀𝗺𝗶𝗱 𝗺𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗰𝗼𝗽𝘆 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- New paper out in PNAS!!! 🎉 Do more plasmid copies mean faster evolution? 🧵 Dive into the story www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethPhage therapy offers a powerful tool against AMR infections—but only if we move from isolated cases to coordinated systems. The first initiative of the ASM Health Unit, led by Colleen Kraft and Dev Mittar, will tackle this. Delighted by this scientific leadership, join us! asm.org/about-asm/as...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethThrilled to see this paper finally out! journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... It was a difficult story to communicate and took us a while to get right. Big congratulations to @wbjorn.bsky.social, Pablo Guridi and Flora Arias-Sanchez!! And thank you the reviewers who helped improve it. Keep reading...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethPhD studentships available through our BBSRC-funded doctoral programme. 🦠🧫💻 Contact me if you're interested in using bioinformatics/lab-based approaches with cultivated and uncultivated bacteria of the human microbiome, to identify and characterize novel enzymes with potential biotech applications.
- Reposted by Ellinor Alseth
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethSo much work still to do to break the glass ceiling! Analysis of millions of biomed & life science articles reveal that female-authored articles spend longer under review than comparable male-authored ones @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4658FZN
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethCool study showing in exquisite details what every parent of kids in daycare already knows...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethOur latest CRISPR ring nuclease paper focusses on Csx15 - which seems to act as of a sponge as well as a canonical phosphodiesterase. Great work led by @haotianchi.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethPhage folks who use the wizard DNA clean up kit to extract Phage DNA, I understand how the silica can hold onto DNA, how does the kit open up the phage in the first place? Mechanical stress from the 10µm silica beads in the resin? Or does the guanidinium thiocyanate do the job?
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethApplication deadline for this postdoc position in my group closing next week 🦠 thank you all who have shared so far!
- 🔊 Job Opportunity: Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Bacterial Evolution. Looking to recruit a postdoc to join a UKRI FLF-funded project on antibiotic resistance evolution in the microbiome 🦠 3 years funding, deadline 26th Jan, please share! hrwebapp.qub.ac.uk/tlive_webrec...
- Reposted by Ellinor Alseth
- Out Now! A phage protein screen identifies triggers of the bacterial innate immune system #MicroSky
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethMy team at @cbitoulouse.bsky.social is recruiting a postdoc #bioinformatics with solid experience in metagenomic analyses. Interest in evolution, ecology & MGEs is important. The offer stands until the perfect candidate is found, and it could be you 🫵 🔁 🙏 #microSky #phagesky #UTIsky @cnrs.fr
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethLovely paper! 😎 Shorthand for microbes is getting confusing though. I get that Kazachstania pintolopesii is a mouthful, but Kp is Klebsiella pneumoniae, or @katholt.bsky.social 🤪? #MicroSky #FridayProblems 🧪
- A fungal commensal secretes a protein that stimulates cellular regeneration in injured gut tissue in mice, with probiotic potential for treating gut-related conditions. #NBThighlight www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethWe've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethHere, we find that many Genomic islands have origins of transfer (oriT) mobilisable by conjugation, incl. known Pathogenicity & defense islands. iOriT use only an oriT for transfer by hitching on conjugative elements: they make abundant, diverse, ancient families of mobile genetic elements. See🧵
- Bacteria chromosomes contain Genomic Islands that provide virulence, antibiotic resistance, MGE-defence,... They transfer between cells, but the mechanism of most remains elusive. Here we explore the conjugative capacity of these mysterious Genomic Islands. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethBacteria chromosomes contain Genomic Islands that provide virulence, antibiotic resistance, MGE-defence,... They transfer between cells, but the mechanism of most remains elusive. Here we explore the conjugative capacity of these mysterious Genomic Islands. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethSuch a privilege to share the Phage Foundry (phagefoundry.org) team’s work at the inaugural GRC meeting on Microbiome Editing 🎉🎊.
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethTemperate #phage face conflicting signals when deciding between lysis & lysogeny. @jbbruce.bsky.social &co show that #bacteriophage integrate info on host condition via SOS responses & on host availability via arbitrium signalling, to optimize infection strategies @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4suIIwr
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethOur new review highlights that ants, cockroaches, and flies carry antimicrobial-resistant bacteria and fungi in hospitals. Better pest management is key to infection prevention. #ASHEJournal #microsky www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethOk science hivemind 🧪. I have a distinct memory of an awesome graphic in a paper about how environmental filtering and biotic interactions determine whether an organism can live in any given place. Almost like multiple filter layers on top of another. Does anyone have a preferred graphic of this?
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethCongratulations to Sean Yu-Hao Wang, Will DePas, @catarmbruster.bsky.social and colleagues on their use of experimental evolution to identify regulators of Mycobacterium abscessus biofilm production! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethNew preprint from my lab (with Arya Kaul, @fernpizza.bsky.social, and @brinda.eu), in which we explore new genes hitchhiking on the beneficial deletion that fused them together, and find them in the LTEE, M. Tb/bovis, and across the bacterial tree of life
- Novel genes arise from genomic deletions across the bacterial tree of life biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethVery happy to say I will be starting a NERC Independent Research Fellowship in April with the University of Exeter 🥳 This 5-year project will be looking at how environmental conditions determine the impact of phage on microbial communities 🧫🦠 Thank you to the lovely ppl who helped along the way!
- Reposted by Ellinor Alseth"The changing roles of Escherichia coli" -- a short essay by yours truly. rdcu.be/eVtXT
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethA four-year postdoc focusing on "plant growth-promoting bacteriophages" available in my group. Skills in metaviromics and metagenomics essential. Application deadline: 2.2.2026. For more info, see the link.
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethManchester Institute of Biotechnology is looking for a new Professor. There are a few priority areas including microbial engineering (broadly defined, from pathways to cells to microbiomes). Closing 12 Jan. Join us in the best city in the UK 😜 www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethAI folks now having to realise what GWAS folks did about studying bacterial genome datasets. Great work by great researchers
- #MachineLearning methods are used to predict #AntimicrobialResistance #AMR from genomic data. @lbarquist.bsky.social &co show that sampling biases driven by population structure severely undermine the accuracy of AMR prediction models even with large datasets @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4iZ0zXQ
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethThe first preprint from @izziepotterill.bsky.social PhD. A clone within ST131 clade C with a totally unique capsule region.
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethBacterial genomes encode a rich repertoire of antiphage systems, but we still know surprisingly little about when these systems are actually expressed. In this preprint, Lucas Paoli et al, ask what shapes antiphage systems expression in native contexts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethLiving in the Arctic 🥶 means Christmas comes early 🎁🥳 10 MNOK (≈1 MUSD) Early Career Investigator grant from the Research Council of Norway to work with the fabulous @bunzela.bsky.social (Max Planck Institute) on uncovering the molecular mechanisms of antibiotic resistance. #AMR #beta-lactamases
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethOur story on plasmid streamlining is now published in PLoS Biology! With @andrewmatthews.bsky.social and @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social #MicroSky #Mevosky journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethIf massive for-profit publishers want quality peer review from over worked academics, then they need to pay for it. Share some of those mega profits
- Reposted by Ellinor Alseth1/28 New preprint up, which I think is the best theoretical idea I've ever had. We asked a simple question: what are the costs of investment into non-reproductive somatic cells? Turns out these costs decrease with the *logarithm* of organism size! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethI am very excited to announce that a fully funded PhD position is available in my group. Topic: Synergistic coevolution in mono-specific and multi-species microbial consortia Please RT or forward this information to interested candidates. Deadline: 11.01.26 More info: shorturl.at/f1TuF
- Reposted by Ellinor Alseth😳 Reversible phenotypic resistance to phage infection via capsule downregulation in Klebsiella pneumoniae #phage #phageky www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
- Reposted by Ellinor Alseth📣🦠Check out our new Editor’s Spotlight! Senior MGEN editor Jesse Shapiro tells us about a recently published paper on the bystander effect on the evolution of Bordetella parapertussis, a non-target species of the pertussis vaccine #MGEN Read the full blog here: microb.io/48zfOlJ
- Hello, old friend 🦠
- Reposted by Ellinor Alseth🦠🧪🧬🚨 New paper and database alert: the new IMG/VR release is now MetaVR ! We have a new website - meta-virome.org - with quick search capabilities for the >24M viruses, >12M vOTUs, and >42M protein clusters (including >790k with predicted structures !). academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethIf you or someone you know is looking for a post-doctoral position working on mycobacterial envelope biology, please get in touch. I am recruiting here at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.
- Reposted by Ellinor Alseth
- Reposted by Ellinor AlsethNew preprint from our lab www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...! Andrea Dos Santos and Clément Vulin combine experiments and models showing how adding glucose can strengthen negative interactions between microbial species. This can be used in tandem with antibiotic treatment to inhibit pathogens!
