Is it anything Hfq-like (RNA chaperone)? Or similar to CsrA (global translation modulator)? We don't know yet. But as it stands, Bacteroidota RRM proteins appear as excellent candidates to map post-transcriptional networks in gut microbiota species. nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

Last month, Gianluca Prezza (@prezzag) from the lab very successfully defended his PhD. 🎓Congratulations, Gianluca!!! While we will sorely miss you, we wish you the best of luck for your future endeavors with @ProfTomEllis. (-AW)

5/5: Sharing our discoveries with the world! 🌍 Our data, now publicly accessible via Theta-Base (micromix.helmholtz-hiri.de/b…), serve as a valuable resource for the microbiome research community, fueling further exploration into the fascinating world of gut bacteria.

4/5: What's MasB up to? 🤔 Using MS2 affinity purification and RNA-seq, we identify MasB's target and explore its impact on bacterial phenotypes. #MasB #GeneRegulation

3/5: Small RNAs (sRNAs) play big roles! 🎵 By expanding the annotation of sRNAs and integrating transcriptomic & functional genomics data, we pinpoint conditionally important ones like MasB, crucial for regulating tetracycline tolerance. #sRNAs #AntibioticResistance

2/5: Unraveling bacterial adaptation mechanisms! 🦠We identify stress- and carbon source-specific transcriptional regulons, shedding light on how B. thetaiotaomicron thrives in the dynamic environment of the human gut. #BacterialAdaptation #TranscriptionalRegulation

1/5: Molecular intricacies of gut bacteria! 🧬 Our study in @NatureMicrobiol , with colleagues from @Helmholtz_HIRI, @DeutschbauerLab , & @LBarquist groups, unveils B. thetaiotaomicron's transcriptional landscape across 15 gut conditions. nature.com/articles/s41564-0…

Congrats to Elise Bornet (@elise_bor) for winning an award at this year's #MosbacherKolloquium @GBM_eV for her poster "Single-cell analyses to dissect morphological heterogeneity in the gut commensal Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron". Way to go! 🥳

BatR represses the expression of proteins involved in the modulation of the cell surface (peptidoglycan, capsule and and LPS biosynthesis). We think that this is how it affects sensitivity to external stressors like bile salts. [5/5]

We constructed a library targeting the intergening sRNAs of B. theta and screened it during growth in the presence of bile salts. We found that the sRNA BatR slows growth under this condition. [4/5]

Therefore we decided to use dCas12a for our CRISPRi platform. We determined the "targeting rules" with a luciferase reporter and showed that targeting the template strand leads to efficient knockdown (as expected, no strand specificity is present when targeting a promoter). [3/5]

We first wondered what would be the nuclease that offers the most target sites in B. theta. Turns out, the TTV PAM of Cas12a is more frequent than the NGG one of Cas9, in both in the AT-rich B. theta genome and its sRNAs! [2/5]