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Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · 3d

This is great! Congrats to the whole team

Reposted by Tera Levin

Thibaut Brunet @thibautbrunet.bsky.social · 3d

Latest from ours: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

This is two stories in one: a case study/cautionary tale on developing genetic tools in new organisms, and the first hint at a gene regulatory network for choanoflagellate multicellular development (which turn out to involve a Hippo/YAP/ECM loop!) A 🧵

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Matthew Herron @matthewherron.bsky.social · 8d

The #NSF Division of Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS) will host a Virtual Office Hour for the #GRFP (Graduate Research Fellowship Program) on Thursday, October 16 at 1 pm ET:

nsf.zoomgov.com/webinar/regi...

The deadline for Life Sciences is November 10.

Webinar Registration - Zoom

nsf.zoomgov.com

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Mark Peifer (He, him) @peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 10d

Here's my comment--join me. This would effectively remove foreign PhD students and postdocs from our labs. please share

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Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · 10d

Heading back from a great visit to Madison! Thank you so much for hosting me, it was wonderful to meet with everyone

Mark Mandel @markjmandel.bsky.social · 13d

Join us on Friday at noon for a great seminar from Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social! @uwmadisonmmi.bsky.social

Announcement: Medical Microbiology & Immunology Seminar Series, September 26, 12:00 pm, MSB 1520. "The Evolution of Immunity and Pathogenesis within Environmental Microbial Battlegrounds". Dr. Tera Levin, University of Pittsburgh.

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Drug Monkey @drugmonkey.bsky.social · 12d

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What if NIH had been 40% smaller?

Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

www.science.org

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Adrià Auladell @adriaula.bsky.social · 21d

trait-space maps are cool.

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Vaughn Cooper @vscooper.micropopbio.org · 14d

🚨 Microbiologists! We are recruiting Assistant / Associate Professors in 3 collaborative areas of our U. Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
1) MMG (my dept): fundamental research in med micro
2) Peds ID / I4Kids institute
3) Center for Vaccine Research
🔗 to all 3 w/info: www.linkedin.com/posts/vaughn...

Faculty Professor Associate - Full-Time | Vaughn Cooper

We are recruiting Faculty microbiologists in three (3) different, complementary, and collaborative areas at the University of Pittsburgh associated with the School of Medicine. 1) Fundamental researc...

www.linkedin.com

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Vaughn Cooper @vscooper.micropopbio.org · 20d

🚨🎉 The Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine (CEBaM) at Pitt is delighted to announce the winners of this year's Catalyst Award program.

This year, Catalysts were designated for science communication projects that engage wider audiences in the field of evolutionary biology and medicine. 🧵🥁

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Josh Mattila @joshmattila.bsky.social · 26d

Open tenure track assistant- or associate-level faculty position in the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Vaccine Research. Great science, great facilities, great colleagues - come work with us!

jobs.sciencecareers.org/job/674888/f...

Faculty, Center for Vaccine Research - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania job with University of Pittsburgh | 674888

University of Pittsburgh Faculty Position Center for Vaccine Research The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Resear...

jobs.sciencecareers.org

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Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · Sep 5

Congrats to both of you!!

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Sorek Lab @soreklab.bsky.social · Sep 2

Preprint: De-novo design of proteins that inhibit bacterial defenses

Our approach allows silencing defense systems of choice. We show how this approach enables programming of “untransformable” bacteria, and how it can enhance phage therapy applications

Congrats Jeremy Garb!
tinyurl.com/Syttt
🧵

Synthetically designed anti-defense proteins overcome barriers to bacterial transformation and phage infection

Bacterial defense systems present considerable barriers to both phage infection and plasmid transformation. These systems target mobile genetic elements, limiting the efficacy of bacteriophage-based t...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Andrew Roger @andrewjroger.bsky.social · Aug 25

I gave a symposium talk at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology 2025 (#eseb2025) meeting last week and this was my title slide showcasing how I was speaking as an independent scientist because @dalhousieu.bsky.social @dalhousie.bsky.social has locked us out.

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Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · Aug 22

Congrats @kdc509.bsky.social !

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Aug 12

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said."

It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy.

I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

RFK Jr. in interview with Scripps News: ‘Trusting the experts is not science’

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sat down with Scripps News for a wide-ranging interview, discussing mRNA vaccine funding policy changes and a recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

www.scrippsnews.com

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Aug 12

5. It has been centuries since any one human could know everything that is known; understand everything that is understood.

This is a remarkable power of science. We delegate trust and authority to experts as internally established in ways that are remarkably resilient to mistakes and malfeasance.

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Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · Aug 7

These are so great Thibaut!

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Liana Lareau @lianafaye.bsky.social · Aug 7

At the same time, we made thousands of synonymous mutations in endogenous yeast genes and measured their growth. We used careful statistics and controls. Only 3%, 204 of 6874, had a fitness effect! This goes against a controversial recent result that most synonymous mutations had fitness effects.

Scatterplot showing fitness effect of ~7000 synonymous mutations in yeast: read count at start vs log2 fold change. Most data points are not significant but 204 points are significant outliers, either advantageous or deleterious.

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Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · Aug 6

Thanks!

Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · Aug 6

Thanks Sunny! Hope you’re doing well

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Reposted by Tera Levin

Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · Aug 5

I'm excited to announce our new biorxiv preprint, wherein we investigate the evolution of the weirdest genetic locus I've ever seen! Behold the tgr genes of the social amoeba, which mediate self/non-self discrimination during facultative multicellularity 🐅 🧵 1/
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hypermutable hotspot enables the rapid evolution of self/non-self recognition genes in Dictyostelium

Cells require highly polymorphic receptors to perform accurate self/non-self recognition. In the amoeba Dicytostelium discoideum, polymorphic TgrB1 & TgrC1 proteins are used to bind sister cells and e...

www.biorxiv.org

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Reposted by Tera Levin

BehavEcolPapers @behavecolpapers.bsky.social · Aug 6

A red algal polysaccharide influences the multicellular development of the choanoflagellate Salpingoeca rosetta CurrentBiology

A red algal polysaccharide influences the multicellular development of the choanoflagellate Salpingoeca rosetta

Perotti et al. find that polysaccharides from algae promote multicellular development in the choanoflagellate S. rosetta. Because algal polysaccharides are abundant in the aquatic environments where S. rosetta resides, this work suggests that algae, in addition to bacteria, can promote life history transitions for choanoflagellates.

dlvr.it

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Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · Aug 5

Also prior work found that development is fine in merodiploids that express some matching and some mismatching tgrB1/C1 alleles. So as long as one pair works, it seems that the cost of experimenting w other versions and creating new tgrBCs is relatively low, which would enable turnover

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Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · Aug 5

Ah, lots of debate on this point, see Croziers paradox. My qualitative thoughts: w each replication there’s a possibility of generating cheater mutants. To avoid this it’s best to cooperate w very close relatives. But this requires lots of new alleles to differentiate sister cells and 100th cousins

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Tera Levin @teralevin.bsky.social · Aug 5

Thanks Jacob!

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