Rob Fagan

Oh that is sad news. RIP Jeff

Find the hot-off-the-press plasmids here!
www.addgene.org/browse/artic...

Huge thanks to everyone involved! Hannah Fisher, Laurence de Lussy Kubisa, @funnirudh.bsky.social, Eloise Walker, Joseph Kirk, @peteroatley.bsky.social, Roy Chaudhuri, Gill Douce and @michaeljormsby.bsky.social

All of these plasmids use a consistent set of restriction sites so a single cloning strategy can be used to evaluate multiple promoters or tags and all cassettes are compatible with the knock-in plasmids for complementation or stable single copy expression

These can be used for identification of strains in mixed populations - particularly useful for competitive index experiments. You can potentially use 12 times fewer mice in infection studies.

Figure 4 from https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001665 - showing the use of genetic barcodes to distinguish strains in mixed populations during competitive growth in vitro or in the mouse gut

Finally we generated a set of knock-in plasmids, including 12 with genetic barcodes that allow the C. difficile genome to be tagged with a 9bp sequence that allows unambiguous identification in sequencing datasets

Figure 2 from https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001665 - showingWestern blot detection of 3xHA and 6xHis tagged proteins, and purification of a StrepTagged protein

Figure 3 from https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001665 - showing fluorescence microscopy of C. difficile and C. sporogenes expressing a range of red fluorescent fusions

To the cloned gene you can add a number of different tags for purification, Western blot detection and fluorescence microscopy - His, HA, StrepTag, mCherry, mScarlet, SNAP, CLIP

Figure 1 from https://doi.org/10.1099/mic.0.001665 - showing promoter activity from a panel of constitutive and inducible promoters in three Clostridia species

We have created a set of modular plasmids with a selection of 10 constitutive and 2 inducible promoters - all of which have been benchmarked in C. difficile, C. sporogenes and C saccharoperbutylacetonicum

A set of genetic tools for use in Clostridioides difficile and related species The Clostridia are a phylogenetically diverse group of anaerobic, spore-forming bacteria that include species of medical, veterinary and industrial importance. The last two decades have seen major adv...

New paper from us.

If you're interested in genetic manipulation of Clostridia, we have a few new tools for you! 36 new plasmids - all available from @addgene.bsky.social

www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

#microsky

Ah! Sorry to hear that mate. I think MRC started sending the rejections today too

MRC?

She's been lead restricted for 3 weeks after spay - that wasn't fun. A lot happier now that she's a forest dog again. I think she is starting to settle a bit. We definitely had a bad few weeks around the 9 month point!

Yellow Labrador Pip asleep with her head on my shoulder. Just visible is the grey wet robe she's wearing

Our puppy turned 1 today. I think I managed to tire her out on a muddy walk!

MRC funding update An update on MRC funding during UKRI’s transition, what’s changing, and the next steps for paused opportunities and reopening timelines.

They've separately said:
Our transition to new ways of working also means we unfortunately expect to make a reduced number of awards to applications currently being assessed by our four research boards and developmental pathway funding scheme.
www.ukri.org/blog/mrc-fun...

So despite Chapman acknowledging poor comms, they're still trying to spin this. "slightly lower" just isn't accurate, not even close. Discussing only 20% of submitted grants and funding at most 20% of these is not a *slightly* lower funding rate

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

Colleagues of mine @naomilpollock.bsky.social and @alice-rothnie.bsky.social are at a BBSRC event today and have been told that the RM call is paused, until maybe March, to allow them to transition to a open call rather than 3 deadlines a year. Nice that this is widely communicated 😉

A master class on how not to do comms.... Thanks for the info Alan!

That's much more positive than the news from MRC - first good news I've heard in the last week

Have you seen anything to suggest when assessments will restart? That's what's missing from the absolutely appalling communication from UKRI. Even a few months delay is going to leave a huge number of postdocs and finishing PhDs high and dry

Absolutely spot on Ali - I think your quotes are excellent

These are the life-blood of science. All that lab knowledge lost, careers ended. All the investment in their training to this point lost to academic research. That's the human cost of UKRI's "review period to develop implementation"

I know what they're getting at with the "could put jobs at risk" but can we focus on the immediate impact? Each suspended round at MRC and BBSRC means about 80 fewer postdoc jobs and the retrospective cuts at MRC add another 30 or so

Leaks everywhere and finally we get an official statement, one that somehow manages to say a lot while; No timelines. No clarity. No acknowledgement of impact on ECRs whose careers depend UKRI funding.

“Later this year” isn’t a plan. And the sector deserves better than reassurance without detail.

They nearly got lynched over the peptoclostridium nonsense

The retrospective cuts I'm referring to are to the sept 2025 MRC round. Absolute maximum 5% success rate means a huge waste of time for the vast majority of us who applied and everyone that reviewed and scored them. From what I've heard there will be no saved money to be rolled forward - it's gone

Finally comms from UKRI - on a Sunday evening. No mention of the hundreds of ECRs who will see their careers ended by these decisions and notably no explanation for MRC retrospectively applying cuts and wasting all the work that went into writing, reviewing and scoring applications - £millions

Dynamic DnaA–DnaB interactions at oriC coordinate the loading and coupled translocation of two DnaB helicases for bidirectional replication Abstract. Bidirectional replication is a conserved principle requiring coordinated translocation of the two replicative helicases loaded at the origin. In

Dynamic DnaA–DnaB interactions at oriC coordinate the loading and coupled translocation of two DnaB helicases for bidirectional replication url: academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

I can probably mention machine learning at least once per paragraph.....