Gaïa posing... 🐶
Devilish cuteness #dog #golden

Needless to say, it also helps when the institution provides professional help for grant writing, which is not the case in smaller universities.

Large study of scientists who move their labs reveals how location drives productivity | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Wildlife at home #wildlife

First flowers of my 16 years old Cornus kousa (red dogwood tree) I grew from seeds. 🌳🌸🍁
#garden #springtime #dogwood #patience

Join the Blokesch lab (@EPFL) as a postdoc in Molecular Microbiology 🤩
Study Vibrio cholerae defense systems (phage/plasmid) in a dynamic, collaborative environment in Lausanne close to Lake Geneva in 🇨🇭!
Please visit my lab's webpage for details about the position and how to formally apply.

🔬 Ph.D. position in Environmental Microbiology
The LCPME is offering a 3-year Ph.D. position to work on the biology of conjugative plasmids carrying antibiotic resistance genes in environmental contexts. This project will combine bacterial genetics, microcosm experiments, and bioinformatic.

Preprint: Conjugative transfer inhibition of IncA and IncC plasmids by pervasive SGI1-like elements via relaxosome assembly interference
#plasmid #relaxase #bacteria #parasite #MGE #plasmidbiology
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Réservez les dates! Le BiSP (bactériologie intégrative, symbiose et pathogénèse) aura lieu le 5 et 6 novembre à l'Université de Sherbrooke - un événement qui sera en "symbiose" avec le MicrHub, rencontre annuelle de tous les microbiologistes de Sherbrooke. À ne pas manquer!

Many thanks! I agree, there are probably intermediates out there.

New online! Interactions and evolutionary relationships among bacterial mobile genetic elements

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
In collaboration with Andrew Lang and Alison Buchan, we just published a review on the complex and sometimes convoluted interactions and evolutionary relationships among bacterial mobile genetic elements.
#phage #plasmid #evolution #bacteria #plasmidbiology #MGE

Go to Google
Search "Gulf of Mexico"
Click the 3 little dots next to "Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)"
Choose "Send feedback"
Click "Gulf of America"
Click "Inaccurate content"
Click "Incorrect"
Tell Google the correct name
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of...

It took me longer than I wanted, but I finally have an official lab website! www.fjplab.com

Officially published now: RDFs for Large Serine Integrases that are moonlighting proteins.
With collaborators the Olorunniji group @femijohn.bsky.social we find the TG1/phiC31 family RDF is an SSB, and the Bxb1 RDF has the fold and activity of an exonuclease.

academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Speaking of which, the Canadian Society of Microbiologists annual meeting is June 17-20 in beautiful Montréal. The EDI Workshop is on the Thursday afternoon event.fourwaves.com/scm-csm2025u...

It's fall 🍂🍁

Just out in PLOS Genetics: Surface exclusion of IncC conjugative plasmids and their relatives.
journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...
Congrats to all the authors!
#plasmids #plasmidbiology

Beautiful auroras last night above Sherbrooke #auroras #nothernlights

1/5
Can random sequences encode meaningful functions and allow de novo gene birth? To explore this, Michael Laub and I screened 100 million random genes, without sequence similarity to natural genes, for their ability to rescue growth arrest of E. coli cells producing the ribonuclease toxin MazF.