Shirli Cohen

Preprint alert! I’m excited to share my work identifying and characterizing the impact of fungal-bacterial nutrient sharing in the vaginal tract 🦠

✨ Exciting News ✨I am thrilled to share that I have accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology (IDM), at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health!

Interview: How a Hearing-Loss Grant Got Cut in the Fight Over DEI “It felt like the floor dropped out,” researcher Uri Manor said after the sudden suspension of his lab’s award.

undark.org/2025/07/11/i...

Diabetes potentiates the emergence and expansion of antibiotic resistance Diabetic infections are a reservoir for the emergence and proliferation of antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus aureus.

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲: 𝗗𝗶𝗮𝗯𝗲𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝘂𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗔𝗠𝗥

Staphylococcus aureus evolves antibiotic resistance rapidly in diabetic mice, as hyperglycemia aids the expansion and takeover of resistant mutants

VISA strains have a large fitness defect in control mice but not in diabetic mice

➡️ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Spots are filling up for the 2025 Microbial Adhesion and Signal Transduction GRC and GRS! Apply to join us July 19-25 at Salve Regina University! It’s going to be a great meeting with amazing science and people! Please re-post!! #MAST

Applications are open for the 2025 GRS/GRC on Staphylococcal Diseases! Make sure to get your abstracts submitted for the potential to present your work in beautiful Barcelona! www.grc.org/staphylococc...

Our paper out @Nature: CARD domains mediate anti-phage defense in bacterial gasdermin systems

CARDs are essential for caspase recruitment during human inflammasome activation. We now find them in bacterial immune systems

Congrats Tana Wein! Thank you Kranzusch lab!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Research supplements to support URM mentees are set to expire today. I met the person who developed this mechanism, Clifton Poodry, at an NSF meeting last fall; he is so inspiring. This supplement has funded thousands of mentees including myself. Devasted to see it canceled, and with no notice.

I’m really looking forward to your talk!

Science Magazine - Dust devil In the spring of 2021, shortly after moving from Seattle to Arizona, Marc Evans, a retired broadcast industry lawyer, began tending the vegetable garden in his niece’s backyard.

Valley fever, or coccidioidomycosis is on the move—endemic to the SW USA, but with increasing hot, dry conditions its being found farther north! Nice story on it in Science www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagaz...

You've heard of FMT, have you heard of NMT (nasal microbiota transplantation)? 👃 This brief piece in Trends discusses 2 recent studies exploring NMT to treat chronic respiratory conditions, like rhinosinusitis (CRS).
🔗 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Time‐of‐day control of mitochondria regulates NLRP3 inflammasome activation in macrophages The circadian clock, orchestrated by BMAL1, regulates the expression of Nlrp3 and Il1b in response to lipopolysaccharide (LPS), causing time-of-day production of pro-IL-1β. Mitochondria exhibit time-....

More nice research from Annie Curtis’ lab on the circadian rhythm and the
#immunometabolism of macrophages.

#immunosky #mitochondria #inflammasome

Time‐of‐day control of mitochondria regulates NLRP3 inflammasome activation in macrophages faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1096/...

After almost a decade (started while I was a postdoc with @nizet.bsky.social and finished by my own stellar students), happy to see this finally out. We found that Tamm-Horsfall protein, the most abundant protein in urine, enhanced NETosis to protect against UTI. insight.jci.org/articles/vie...

40 years ago all of Genbank was published in print form by NAR. The same format today would require over 4 light seconds of shelf space. To a year of progress in 2025.

Experimental horizontal transfer of phage-derived genes to Drosophila confers innate immunity to parasitoids Tarnopol et al. recapitulate the horizontal transfer of anti-parasitoid toxins from microbes to insects in D. melanogaster. Immune tissue expression of one toxin gene, fusionB, was sufficient to drive parasitoid resistance in flies via the humoral innate immune pathway.

Bizarre and cool

Flies have stolen the gene encoding a toxin from bacteria and deployed it to survive predation by parasitic wasps, which in some flies can turn half of all fly larvae into surrogate wombs for baby wasps

@nkwhiteman.bsky.social lab at UC Berkeley recapitulates this in Drosophila.

Regulation of human interferon signaling by transposon exonization Transposable element exonization can yield functional protein isoforms as seen for primate-specific IFNAR2.

I’m excited to share our latest study led by @giuliapasquesi.bsky.social out today in @cellpress.bsky.social , uncovering a new way transposons have been repurposed for human interferon signaling! Read on for a thread on cryptic splice variants, decoy receptors, and viruses (1/N) 👇🧵 #TESky 🧪

Early prediction of preeclampsia using the first trimester vaginal microbiome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.01.626267v1 Preeclampsia is a severe obstetrical syndrome which contributes to 10-15% of all maternal deaths. Al

Early prediction of preeclampsia using the first trimester vaginal microbiome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.01.626267v1

Cervical cancer mortality in US women younger than 25 years significantly declined between 2016 and 2021, likely due to the widespread adoption of HPV vaccination.

ja.ma/4i9ghPC

Excited to share our latest, "Biofilm dispersal patterns revealed using far-red fluorogenic probes." @plos.bsky.social We developed a cell-labeling strategy using far-red dyes to image dense microbial communities (where fluorescent proteins often do not work well) journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Bacterial single-cell RNA sequencing captures biofilm transcriptional heterogeneity and differential responses to immune pressure

-in #NatureCommunications by Lee Korshoj and Tammy Kielian

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Relatedly, I buy my KN-95 masks from @bonafidemasks.bsky.social, and right now you can use coupon code TRUST25 for a 25% discount. No, this is not paid advertisement. I've just used 'em for years and have had great experiences. bonafidemasks.com/powecom-kn95/

go.bsky.app/2bqX3T7 - please send me your @bsky.app handles to include in this growing community.

Dietary zinc deficiency promotes Acinetobacter baumannii lung infection via IL-13 in mice Nature Microbiology - Increased IL-13 drives increased bacterial dissemination and mortality following Acinetobacter baumannii lung infection of zinc-deficient mice and can be countered by...

SO EXCITED to share our recent work on dietary zinc deficiency worsening Acinetobacter baumannii pneumonia, out today with @natureportfolio.bsky.social!! Surprisingly, this is due at least in part to the allergic-type cytokine IL-13. SharedIt link: rdcu.be/d0h4h Eat your zinc rich foods! 🦪🫘🧀🥩🥜

Hello Blueskis. Here is a starter pack of General Microbiology. It's a small list currently. Please feel free to self-nominate and I will add you.

go.bsky.app/QgSQHJ9

Amyloid signaling in antiphage defense Immune regulated cell death (RCD) is a defense strategy common to different domains of life involving purposeful sacrifice of infected cells. In animals and fungi, functional amyloids play a role in t...

To celebrate all these new arrivals on BlueSky, did you see this recent preprint on the role of amyloïd in anti-phage defense?

Molecular characterization of amyloid as signal transduction in E. coli phage defense, with super cool links wt fungi controlled cell death!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The Medical Mycology Trainee Seminar Series is back! Our next seminar is November 14th at 4 pm GMT (5 pm Central Europe Time, 11 am Eastern Standard, 8 am Pacific Standard, 12 am in China). 1/12

Me and my golden retriever. The ground is covered in snow and we are both looking at the camera with big smiles.

Hi! I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado studying the ways that fungi and bacteria interact with each other in the vaginal tract and how they impact adverse pregnancy outcomes and fetal/neonatal infection. I’m a big fan of microscopy, my dog, and spreading the word about cool microbes!