Helena Shomar
@HelenaShomar
Antivirals & antibiotics from bacteria/MCSA-ParisR Fellow @MDMlab_Paris/SynBio & Metabolic Engineering/Bioart & Biodesign enthusiast/SciComm & Education🇫🇷🇲🇽
In the spirit of the New Year and new beginning, here some news☀️: 1. Some updates about my next professional adventure (spoiler alert: I left academia) 2. I have decided to leave Twitter ! More on these points below 👇 If you wanna keep in touch: bsky.app/profile/hshoma…
Two years ago we published the discovery of hotspots of novel anti-phage defense systems in the genome of P4 phage satellites, including a mysterious Phage Anti-Restriction Induced System (PARIS). We have now published the mechanism in @Nature nature.com/articles/s4158…
AMAZING ! Well deserved!!!! David and Demis have been my personal Beyonce and Rihanna for years 🤩🤩🤩
BREAKING NEWS The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2024 #NobelPrize in Chemistry with one half to David Baker “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”
My cat Shouka came to the lab for his monthly meeting to help us with BGC refactoring #NaturalProductsCat
After a high dose of psilocybin, the brain desynchronizes at a massive scale, causing loss of our sense of self, time, and space. This may drive the burst of plasticity caused by psychedelics. The next day, brain activity has largely returned to normal, but an echo remains – a…
1/ 🧵 Thrilled to share work of @EligoBio just published in @Nature ! We show proof of principle results of efficient base editing performed on E. coli directly in the mouse gut 🦠💡 #Microbiome #SyntheticBiology nature.com/articles/s4158…
Scientists in France have expressed relief that the right-wing party National Rally was defeated in yesterday’s parliamentary elections go.nature.com/3xROocr
Together with @AudeBer we wrote a research briefing: "Evolutionary history of an immune protein conserved across all domains of life" nature.com/articles/s4155… Link PDF: rdcu.be/dM5fY We describe our findings recently published in @NatureEcoEvo : nature.com/articles/s4155…
Yasmine Belkaid, directrice générale de l’Institut Pasteur : « Aujourd’hui, j’ai peur de perdre ce qui m’a fait choisir la France » lemonde.fr/idees/article/… via @lemondefr
What a week!🥳 Our work describing the functional and evolutionary history of viperins is finally out! We describe how this ancient immune gene was conserved and diversified across the tree of life ! Hope you enjoy the final version of the manuscript 😀
Our paper on the evolutionary history of Viperins is now out in Nature Ecology and Evolution @NatureEcoEvo : nature.com/articles/s4155… 🤩 As for other papers from the lab, we created an outreach video summarizing our findings here: youtu.be/om1HFfOCiDQ
Viperin immunity evolved across the tree of life through serial innovations on a conserved scaffold rdcu.be/dMJJd
Paper out today: “RNA-guided RNA Silencing by an Asgard archaeal Argonaute”. A wonderful, multidisciplinary project co-led with @DCSwarts @ChirlminJoo_Lab, spearheaded by @C_Bastiaanssen @pilar_bobadilla @k1jun_ @FinocchioGiada & Yanlei Feng. nature.com/articles/s4146… @NatureComms
A new kid on the block of "chemical defense" against phage infection. @HelenaShomar reports on the antiphage activity of lanthipeptides. Remembering early discussion in Portugal and now looking forward to reading your beautiful work! @SPP2330
🚨Super excited to share our pre-print describing how we used genomics to discover a family of anti-phage lanthipeptides from Actinobacteria 🦠 This marks a significant expansion in the number of bacterial natural products involved in chemical defense. A thread 👇: @MDMlab_Paris
Modified peptides produced by bacteria protect from phage infection - congrats @HelenaShomar and @AudeBer for this fantastic discovery! Can these new antiviral molecules also inhibit viruses that infect humans? 🤔
🚨Super excited to share our pre-print describing how we used genomics to discover a family of anti-phage lanthipeptides from Actinobacteria 🦠 This marks a significant expansion in the number of bacterial natural products involved in chemical defense. A thread 👇: @MDMlab_Paris
Bacteria produce chemical compounds that humans harness as drugs (ex antibiotic). We hypothesize that a major biological role of these compounds have been overlooked: antiviral defense. 👇Discovery of lantiphages, a large BGC family wt antiphage function biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
🚨Super excited to share our pre-print describing how we used genomics to discover a family of anti-phage lanthipeptides from Actinobacteria 🦠 This marks a significant expansion in the number of bacterial natural products involved in chemical defense. A thread 👇: @MDMlab_Paris