Mart Krupovic

With Eugene Koonin, we wrote a rather comprehensive review on the origin, evolution and organization of the #virosphere. We describe all 10 viral realms and the logic behind them, and so much more. Check it out! comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/biologies/ar...

#gbdraw v0.14.1 is here!🚀 New language options (experimental): Español, Français, Português, Bahasa Indonesia, Tiếng Việt, ไทย, 日本語, 简体中文, 繁體中文, and 한국어. Try now: gbdraw.app #bioinformatics #virology #microbiology #genomics #genomics

🚨 New preprint 🚨 We’ve discovered millions of viruses from sequencing data but we don’t always know who they infect. Our new tool, VHAMSTeR generates broad virus host predictions across the tree of life (prokaryote, plant, animal, fungi and protist hosts) A thread 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/4 Bacterial immunity with “two-factor authentication”? Our new preprint by @monikajasnauskaite.bsky.social et al. reveals how DRT4 combines DNA synthesis with recognition of a phage protein to activate antiviral defense - a short thread below 🧵 BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Meet the giant Sissivirus (and its #virophage)! With 4 Mbp genome, Sissivirus is the champion of all known viruses (by genome size). Check the preprint to learn how it got so big. The study led by Julien Andreani, Frederik Schulz @fmschu.bsky.social & Bernard La Scola www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A single archaeon couples long-chain fatty acid oxidation to methanogenesis So, "methanogens can function as primary degraders of complex organic matter, challenging the classical syntrophic paradigm" 🦠 (shareable link to read the article: rdcu.be/t3PwCaNNrEMa) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A giant virus with a 4-megabase genome and a vastly expanded repeatome. | bioRxiv

💥 Post-doc opportunity! 💥 Come join our team (www.thelowlab.org) at Imperial, London, working on the cryo-EM structure and mechanism of bacterial secretion systems. 48 months. Please RT. For more details and to apply: www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Functions and evolution of viral proteins #virology #viruses #proteins #MicroSky @asm.org journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

After tRNA, rRNA, mRNA, RluA apparently also modifies phage RNA (E. coli) 🦠 A host enzyme pseudouridylates an RNA bacteriophage genome and accelerates virus production www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Check out our recent paper in the annual reviews of Virology! 👇 👇 👇

LoL-align is out in @natmethods.nature.com! It aligns protein structures without superposition. More sensitive than TM-align and DALI, producing better alignments 5–20× faster. Now available in Foldseek! 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💾 github.com/steineggerlab/foldseek 🌐 search.foldseek.com

Retron biology keeps surprising us. Type VI does things VERY differently! 🧬 Check the paper to see how it works👇 Fun working with the @seth-shipman.bsky.social lab on this story!

A new preprint 🎉 from phagefoundry.org Mycobacteriophages are candidate therapies for drug-resistant mycobacterial infections, but we still don't know how most of them get into their hosts. Our new preprint tackles this challenge 👉🏽 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Finally, our Sukunaarchaeum paper is out in Current Biology!! authors.elsevier.com/c/1nvtC3QW8S...

How do redox conditions in an Asgard archaea-rich environment determine their vertical distribution? Find out in our latest paper about the amazing Catherine crater lake microbial mat: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Where did eukaryogenesis likely happened? We studied a modern analog: microbial mats from a sulfidic, low O2, volcanic crater lake in the Afar region. Asgardarchaea thrive in the SO4-reduction zone along SO4-reducers :) @deemteam.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Finally out! Our work uncovers evolutionary links between bacterial and archaeal ribosome hibernation and eukaryotic energy sensing, through the archaeal hibernation factor AHA link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New preprint from Dodonova lab 🔔! Capturing multiple states by cryo-EM❄️, we show for the first time how archaeal RNA Polymerase engages a nucleosome and forms direct contacts with histones! 🧬 Great work by Gabriele & a fantastic collaboration with Dina Grohmann! 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Diverse S-layer anchoring mechanisms create an epiplasmic space in prokaryotic cell envelopes. Our review with @bupbuse.bsky.social and @vikramalva.bsky.social discussing a cellular compartment created by the S-layer out in Current Opinion in Microbiology. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Our review on S-layer anchoring and the epiplasmic space is out in Current Opinion in Microbiology. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

🎉 Scaling Phage-Bacteria Interaction Contexts: From Pairwise Mechanisms to Community Dynamics www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... #phagesky

The final version of our manuscript on TnSeq in bacteriophages (“HIDEN-SEQ”) is out today – if you have an interesting phage phenotype and want to know the underlying genetic basis, this one is for you! 1/4

What happens when two viruses coinfect the same host? Check out the first publication of my PhD, where we describe two new viruses from an extremophilic system! www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Thrilled to see this published today! Truly special because we made the initial discovery >15 yrs ago! We found two copies of a human gene called BC200 embedded in a human poxvirus. BC200 blurs the line between gene & transposon—both functional & mutagenic! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵1/n

Why did some #viruses #evolve to be giants while others did not? ".. #giantViruses are typical viruses that evolved from smaller ones via accretion of genes recruited from the hosts." doi.org/10.1073/pnas... @mkrupovic.bsky.social & E. Koonin

Super excited to share my postdoctoral work at @imbavienna.bsky.social @viennabiocenter.bsky.social - We discovered that some retrotransposons, or "jumping genes" 🧬, are able to spread from cell to cell via a new viral infectivity route. A short thread: 🧵👇 (1/7)

Interested in #archaea, #methane, #cell-envelopes? New paper out @nature.com ! We discovered an enzyme that specifically cleaves the cell wall of methanogens, revealing a new chemical structure of archaeal peptidoglycan, 50 yrs after its first description www.nature.com/articles/s41... #MicroSky 🧵👇

Out now in Science: Two papers from our lab reveal VIPR, an RNA-guided DNA-targeting system in bacteriophages, providing clues to the origins of CRISPR www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Congrats to Peter Yoon, @kenjmloi.bsky.social @terryzzy.bsky.social, T.Docter & team

Some of the smallest 😎 viruses on Earth are all around us. Three or four genes 😍 each, in nearly every environment. We keep finding thousands by sequencing, yet don't know who they infect, can't easily isolate them, or even how the few we have infect a cell. Our new preprint takes this on 🧵👇

Our paper on type II Panoptes is now published at PLOS Biology with new data on phage escapers - quite a step up in microbiology for our lab, led by Sabine Gruschow. Thanks to @erc.europa.eu for funding dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

New paper in Current Biology @currentbiology.bsky.social 🦠 Why do bacteria ditch their T6SS weapon? E. coli keeps it vs susceptible rivals, but loses it when facing immune ones. Great work by @bobytaillefer.bsky.social & Jonas Desjardins! www.cell.com/current-biol...

Why did some #viruses evolve to be #giants while others did not? Our perspective piece on this topic with Eugene Koonin. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share our preprint on Ignicoccus cell divison: only the inner membrane divides, progeny cells accumulate in cell clusters and pop-out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Great work with the labs: @buzzbaum.bsky.social @curiousdina.bsky.social @anja1.bsky.social @tbharat-lab.bsky.social

Thrilled to share my first first-author publication in PLOS Pathogens! 🎉 We structurally characterize a non-tailed vibriophage and describe an unusual symmetry mismatch! Work completed at @carmensmp.bsky.social lab at @cnb-csic.bsky.social Check it out! journals.plos.org/plospathogen... (1/5)

Databases may contain lots of misannotated 16S rRNA sequences, which can hinder accurate taxonomic assignment in metabarcoding and metagenomic analyses. We have addressed this issue for Asgard archaea and generated a curated set of high-quality 16S rRNA sequences: academic.oup.com/ismecommun/a...

Identifying #antiphage defense systems can be challenging. This study by @duerkoplab.bsky.social describes a #bioinformatic pipeline that uses a small serine recombinase as a genetic marker to identify novel antiphage defense systems across diverse bacterial phyla. 🧪 #AcademicSky plos.io/4i4ZrUu

Structure and operating principles of a monkeypox virus replisome | @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bacterial ribosomes can synthesize proteins encoded within their own RNA - WOW🔥 Very elegant and inspiring work from Shura Mankin's lab - Congratulations! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This job ad is now live! Please share or apply here: jobs.montana.edu/postings/52780 Screening of applicants begins Sept 15, 2026 #MicroSky #PhageSky #ScienceJobs

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 Choanoflagellates reorganize their global cytoskeletal architecture within seconds to explore confined microspaces. This is the main PhD work of the amazing @maitefreired.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A tread 🧵⬇️

Just published! IStrons are a unique class of transposable elements that pack three distinct functions in one nucleotide sequence. In this work, we used pooled library mutagenesis and high-throughput sequencing to systematically map the sequence and structural features that govern these functions.

This comprehensive review synthesises current knowledge on the infection cycles of #Nucleocytoviricota (giant DNA viruses), highlighting shared mechanisms and lineage-specific innovations across diverse #virus families. 🦠🔬 📄 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-026-01319-6 👤 EVBC member: Mart Krupovic

The most interesting studies often begin with random observations, but it takes a great team to publish them. Thanks to @excellentia.bsky.social, all coauthors @phytophthorarc.bsky.social, and especially Kohei and Mart @mkrupovic.bsky.social, for this amazing joint journey! doi.org/10.1093/ve/v...

Large eukaryotic DNA viruses encode ESCRT machinery for membrane remodelling #microbiology #viruses #DNA #eukaryotes #MicroSky @natmicrobiol.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415...

The prokaryotic lipid divide: how strict is it? doi:10.1515/hsz-2026-0149 sciflow.eu?paper=958371

Dear eukaryotic, archaeal and bacterial virologists, I don't know how most of you feel about taxonomy, but it has an impact on all of our working lives. I am curious to hear from you about your opinion on subspecies classification based on this survey: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

This is such a cool observation, some enveloped viruses encode their own ESCRTs. My fellow ESCRTologists, we are never going to get bored!