EW, thank god I graduated when I did! (jk, miss y’all! Just not the ticks!)

Wow, such a fun read! Some really interesting tidbits in there that I’d love to discuss more! Congrats @nanamikubota.bsky.social !

Thanks Mark!

to make decisions, we looked at how phage presence changes bacterial quorum sensing and virulence! Check out the preprint for more details! Thanks to everyone who made this work possible! 🍾 7/7

We noticed right off the bat some clear differences between strains with a phage (WT) and strains where we used pflM to delete the phage (ΔPf). Phenazine production and biofilm formation is regulated by quorum sensing (density dependent voting via small molecules)…🧵 6/7

As scientists do, we decided to use this tool to investigate the relationship Pf phages have with their hosts. Using pflM, we cured clinical isolates from all over the world of phage infection. 🧵 5/7

Normally when a prophage excises from the bacterial chromosome it produces viral progeny, but we saw no plaque formatting and NO amplification with qPCR….suggesting that targeting pflM effectively CURES the bacterial host of its prophage! Wild!!! 🧵 4/7

UNTIL we decided to run an excision assay to check if the prophage was in the bacterial chromosome. Turns out deleting this gene, which we named Pf-lysogeny-maintenance (pflM) caused Pf4 to pop out! 🧵 3/7

Back in 2020, my first year of grad school, I was making deletion mutants of each gene writhing the core Pf genome. One pesky gene I just couldn’t seem to get a mutant for, and after a few tries we almost threw in the towel…. 🧵 2/7

Lab 🤝 Lecture 🫡

Yay!! 🦠 microbiologists unite!

Thanks, Scott!