Ian Monk
@ianmonknz.bsky.social
760 followers 470 following 22 posts
Molecular Microbiologist at the Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne. All things Staph, Listeria, Enterococci, Phages and Sport.
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Reposted by Ian Monk
bconlon.bsky.social
Delighted to share our latest paper - A host-directed adjuvant sensitizes intracellular bacterial persisters to antibiotics. Excellently led by Dr. Kuan-Yi Lu. We think it's a great proof-of-concept that altering immune cell behavior can make antibiotics work better www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A host-directed adjuvant sensitizes intracellular bacterial persisters to antibiotics - Nature Microbiology
The authors developed a screen to find compounds that modulate intracellular Staphylococcus aureus metabolism and discovered KL1, which sensitizes persisters to antibiotics by reversing host-induced tolerance.
www.nature.com
Reposted by Ian Monk
angierasmussen.bsky.social
I don’t know who needs to hear this but the CDC is being eviscerated right now. America is not going to have any kind of outbreak response capacity after tonight. Americans’ health data is no longer secure. Say goodbye to federal public health in any capacity. It’s a disaster. We won’t recover.
Reposted by Ian Monk
Reposted by Ian Monk
Reposted by Ian Monk
microbiologysociety.org
Phosphate sensing by PhoPR regulates the cytotoxicity of Staphylococcus aureus. Published Open Access and fee-free in Microbiology using a Publish and Read agreement: doi.org/10.1099/mic.... #MicrobioJ #PublishAndRead
Fig. 1.
Cytotoxicity is altered in transposon mutants of TCSs in S. aureus. To quantify cytotoxicity, the bacterial supernatant from transposon mutants in each non-essential HK and RR gene was incubated with THP-1 cells, and the percentage of dead cells was quantified using trypan blue exclusion. THP-1 killing was calculated relative to the THP-1 killing of JE2 (WT) in each assay. Each dot represents one biological replicate (n = 3), error bars represent the sd and statistical significance was determined using multiple t-tests with an FDR of 1% applied. Significant hits, which had an adjusted P-value ≤0.01, are highlighted in purple.
Reposted by Ian Monk
natrevdiseaseprimers.nature.com
#Listeria monocytogenes causes serious infections by invading cells and crossing intestinal, blood–brain, and placental barriers, leading to #bacteraemia, CNS, and maternal–neonatal complications https://www.nature.c...
Schematics showing the mechanisms of Listeria monocytogenes infection and dissemination.
Reposted by Ian Monk
veeninglab.com
Finally out, such an awesome piece of work, very proud of this one: www.cell.com/cell-systems... #MicroSky
Reposted by Ian Monk
jennyrohn.bsky.social
This is pretty amazing. Aside from everything else, can finally start to scratch the surface of understanding compensatory pathways/redundancy in bacteria
Reposted by Ian Monk
jeremymberg.bsky.social
When I was at NIH and shutdowns loomed, it was discovered that the administration was planning to shut down PubMed. The head of NCBI called the powers that be and pointed out that this would threaten patient safety

Who knows what will happen now

Just in case, remember Euruope-PMC
(europepmc.org )
a cartoon of donald trump with the words be prepared above him
ALT: a cartoon of donald trump with the words be prepared above him
media.tenor.com
Reposted by Ian Monk
jeremymberg.bsky.social
This may just be paranoia on my part, but I have learned not to discount those feelings over the past 8 months.

Always good to be prepared in any case.
Reposted by Ian Monk
jasonyanglab.org
Very happy to share some more good news. Our collaboration with Jeffrey Boyd's lab is now published at J Inorganic Biochemistry! Here, Jeff found that iron limitation reprograms S. aureus metabolism towards fermentation. We're grateful to be part of this study.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Fermentative growth decreases the iron demand of Staphylococcus aureus
Iron (Fe) is an essential nutrient for S. aureus survivability and pathogenesis, but excess Fe can catalyze the formation of toxic oxygen radicals, em…
www.sciencedirect.com
Reposted by Ian Monk
bugsinblood.bsky.social
Now published! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very nice collaboration with Hoogenboom ( @ucl.ac.uk ) and Bonev ( @uniofnottingham.bsky.social ) labs.
Reposted by Ian Monk
dotnagy.bsky.social
To summarise our recent pre-print: Autocycler, the automated consensus assembler, when used with Nanopore long-read only Enterobacterales assemblies, produces more complete chromosomes and plasmids, with an accuracy comparable to hybrid assemblies.
Figure 2 from my recently pre-printed manuscript on the completeness and accuracy of Nanopore long-read only bacterial genome assembly for Enterobacterales. a) tile plot of chromosome circularisation, with assembler on the x-axis and sample on the y-axis, shows that the consensus long-read only assembler, Autocycler, circularised more chromosomes at 95% (87/92) than any other long-read or hybrid assembler. b) complex upset plot of plasmid reconstruction, showing that the best plasmid reconstruction was achieved by long-read assemblers incorporating the separate plasmid assembly tool, Plassembler, namely Autocycler and Hybracter, reconstructing >96% of plasmids.
Reposted by Ian Monk
nizet.bsky.social
Pleased to share the new article from UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy PharmD/PhD student Daniel Sun focused on repurposing FDA-approved agents to inhibit virulence, restore antibiotic susceptibility, bolster host defenses, and modulate inflammation v. S. aureus
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
Reposted by Ian Monk
geiselbiofilm.bsky.social
New in JB: Ma, Wang & Li review the role of DNA methylation in regulating pathogenesis, drug resistance, biofilm formation, adhesion, and motility and more!
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
@asm.org #JBacteriology
Reposted by Ian Monk
jlsteenwyk.bsky.social
Apple's approach to protein structure is great for accessibility - & potentially biological realism - reasons.

Eg, prediction could be achieved w/ smaller compute & the generative nature of prediction allows for multiple conformations

A summary here: genomely.substack.com/p/simplefold...
SimpleFold and the Future of Protein Folding
A Generative Shift in Protein Folding
genomely.substack.com