iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Thomas @chrismthomas.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

After discussion with some current students at the University of Birmingham I sent them a link to a YouTube video some of my students (Carys Ladd, Sanem Sertug and Yuqian Ye) made about our work a few years ago so I thought I would share the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH8A...

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Chris Thomas @chrismthomas.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

‪Chris Thomas‬ Our commercialisation arm, University of Birmingham Enterprise Ltd, issued a press release last week (bit.ly/3SBfuLq) related to our recent Nucleic Acids Research paper (bit.ly/4lSyCSH ) and other on-going work.

bit.ly

Research advances on ‘displacing’ antibiotic resistance gene from bacteria - University of Birmingham

The research is on plasmids, small, circular strands of DNA, that allow bacteria to share genes rapidly, and carry genes conferring antibiotic resistance.

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Chris Thomas @chrismthomas.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

This week's highlight was the 2nd ISPB Virtual Seminar 2025 (www.plasmidbiologysociety.org/ispb-virtual...) organised by Manuel Ares Arroyo, Fabienne Benz and Pedro Dorado Morales (Inst Pasteur) Great talks by Maho Tokuda and Celia Souque. You can still sign up if you have not already done so.

plasmidbiologysociety.org

ISPB Virtual Seminar Series 2025 | International Society for Plasmid Biology

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Chris Thomas @chrismthomas.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

At what stage will someone decide that NCBI should not be a worldwide resource?

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Chris Thomas @chrismthomas.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

The second great paper concerns the discovery in Eva Top's group that an enigmatic protein encoded by IncP-1beta plasmids modulates the IncP-1 circuitry in E. coli to make the plasmid a burden in this host: Elg et al recently accepted in Molecular Biology and Evolution doi.org/10.1093/molb...

Chris Thomas @chrismthomas.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

It is a privilege to be an author on two great plasmid papers already this year. The first was McLean et al in Nature Microbiology focused on KorB and the discovery that it is a CTPase by Yung Le's group at the John Innes Institute in Norwich. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

KorB switching from DNA-sliding clamp to repressor mediates long-range gene silencing in a multi-drug resistance plasmid - Nature Microbiology

Structural and single-molecule analyses show the CTPase, KorB, is a sliding DNA clamp that interacts with a clamp-locking protein KorA to inhibit gene expression over distances of more than 1 kb in th...

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