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Hugerth lab

@h-mel.bsky.social
275 followers 494 following 123 posts

Human molecular ecology lab at Uppsala University. Microbiota as a modifiable risk factor in women's health. Bloops by @luhugerth.bsky.social

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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Very cool PhD position on bacterial evolution to intracelular lifestyles with my best buddy Lionel Guy in Uppsala! www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...
uu.se
PhD student position in Bioinformatics/Evolutionary Microbiology - Uppsala University
PhD student position in Bioinformatics/Evolutionary Microbiology, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology, Uppsala University
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Me, last night: ok, ok, I've done the peer reviews I've committed to, I declined the ones I can't take on, I'm good My inbox, this morning: 4 new peer review requests Come ON!
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Vagina Museum @vaginamuseum.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
At we swelter under another heatwave, let's dust off our guide to keeping your vulva as happy as possible, dearest moist goblins
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Claudio Cantù @claudiocantu81.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
FINAL CALL! Register by the end of May to this year's edition 23-26 June 2026 Focus will OMICS data integration, with hands-on computation🧬 💻 Check out the program and your stellar teachers: www.trippus.net/summerschool... @scilifelab.se @kawresearch.bsky.social @remeseiro-lab.bsky.social
trippus.net
Summer School 2026
Come to this beautiful Swedish inland scenario to learn the most advanced technologies to study transcriptional regulation.
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Zamin Iqbal @zaminiqbal.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...
npr.org
Researchers say the Trump administration is finding new ways to punish science
Even with federal grants largely restored, scientists say the Trump administration is still preventing those funds from reaching them. The consequences, they say, are already becoming clear.
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CEMUS Uppsala University @cemusuppsala.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Join us for the Gender and Environment Symposium at 13:00 tomorrow! 📍 27 May 2026 🕐 13:00–16:15 📍 Loftet banquet hall, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) Duhrevägen 8, 756 51 Uppsala (maps.app.goo.gl/kdhS2apDskMJ...) We look forward to seeing you there 🌱
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Great day at the #womher symposium, and first poster presentation for our PhD student Delaram Bameri!
Smiling PhD student next to her poster entitled "Beyond the bump: oral health as an overlooked dimension of perinatal care"
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Daniel Tamarit @danieltamarit.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
I'm looking for an enthusiastic student to join my team as a PhD candidate on archaeal genome evolution 🦠💻 Work in beautiful Utrecht, at @binfutrecht.bsky.social, an international group full of caring, amazing scientists, and with frequent cake breaks! www.uu.nl/en/organisat... Please share! 🙏
uu.nl
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Rauf Salamzade @raufs.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
New versions of skDER (github.com/raufs/skDER) and zol (github.com/Kalan-Lab/zol) are now on Bioconda. Both have automated downloading of genomes based on species / genus name according to classifications in GTDB R232. The latest zol also incorporates FAMSA2 which provides considerable speed boosts!
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naturepoker @binomicalabs.org · 21/05/2026
12 fold increase in papers citing non-existent references in two years. People who do this genuinely don't care. Also they likely have institutional affiliations and advanced degrees, 0 independent researchers. retractionwatch.com/2026/05/07/o... 🧪
retractionwatch.com
One in 277 PubMed-indexed papers in 2026 shows fabricated references, says analysis
Figure from correspondence to The Lancet by Maxim Topaz and colleagues. Fabricated citations in the biomedical literature have increased 12-fold in two years, according to an audit of nearly 2.5 mi…
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Nicola Low @nicolamlow.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
🧪 #PandemicPreparedness 💯 „Preparedness is not built during a crisis press conference or after a pathogen has already crossed borders.“ Hope that coincidence of World Health Assembly @who.int with 2 deadly outbreaks and slashed funding makes people #JoinTheDots and invest now archive.ph/EoSxW
archive.ph
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Ele Willoughby @minouette.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
For International Tea Day, my Green Tea Chemistry print. 🧪🐡 This linocut illustrates green tea and its chemistry. There’s a tea pot, 2 cups of tea & a tea plant (Camellia sinensis) on a tray, & in the steam, you can see some of the organic chemicals found in green tea. Up to 27% of the composition 🧵
This linocut illustrates green tea and its chemistry. There's a tea pot, two cups of tea and a tea plant (Camellia sinensis) on a tray, and in the steam, you can see some of the organic chemicals found in green tea. At the base of the tray is a chromatogram to illustate the L-Theanine (largest peak) and other amino acids in the green tea.⁠
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Camila Gazolla Volpiano, PhD @gazollavolpiano.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
New preprint! The first first-author work of my postdoc at the Baker! So, babies' airways are colonised from birth, and our group has shown that early colonisers shape respiratory health. 1/7 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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Piotr Rozwalak @prozwalak.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Mushuvirus is the most widespread phage genus in the human gut. 🌍 Together with other family members, these viruses occur in 89% of humans worldwide, including the Iceman Ötzi! How is it possible that they were hidden in previous metagenomic analyses? [1/7] Read: doi.org/10.64898/202...
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
And for further questions, ask @ezgiboz.bsky.social directly!
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
This strategy will yield a list of candidates; an RNA-guided CRISPR system allows the mutant and WT strains to compete and be tracked in vivo (with the plant and its resident microbiome).
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
The interesting part are the 80% of genes that can be knocked out when growing in pure culture - can they still grow plant-associated? If not, the gene is essential for the interaction.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
To understand the genetic and ecological underpinnings of this interaction, they use forward and reverse genetic approaches. Random barcode transposition helps identify essential genes (by killing mutants in them).
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
And last for today (bc I can't register flash talks quick enough), Ezgi Mehmetoglu Boz in Derek Lundberg's lab at SLU, studying how Sphingomonas colonise their plant hosts. This is mostly a symbiotic relationship, with promising uses in agriculture.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Understanding this fundamental repertoire is important to understand if and how species will adapt to climate changes and ecosystem loss. Right now this is being tested on extensive Swiss data, but will it hold for tropical environments...?
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
...but maybe this is just data bias, or undersampling? Experimental data shows that catterpillars can also thrive on plants (fundamental host repertoire) that butterflies do not choose (realized host repertoire).
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Elena Quintero, from Mariana Braga's lab at SLU presents an overview of their work with catterpillar-plant co-evolution. These interactions are antagonistic (parasitic), which is usually characterised by a narrow host range - but a long tail! Tropical species are thought to be more specialised...
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Software developed in the lab can both find candidate CNV (rCNV) and investigate the exact margins of this amplification (ArDu); everything is on GitHub, of course.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
With this approach, they found 300 adaptive CNV in the Norway Spruce, correlating to e.g. latitude, temperature or thickness of the tree trunk (Zhou et al, in review)
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
CNV are simple to find with model species and good reference genome, but are very hard for population-level sequencing. They developed a technique to infer CNV from available SNP data, based on allelic ratios (Karunarathne et al 2023)
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
In large eukaryotic species, structural variations are extremely common. CNV affect c. 10% of all genes in A. thaliana and bc they're themselves quantitative, they should yield a gradient of phenotypes (optimal for environmental gradients).
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
SciLife fellow Pascal Milesi comes next with the evolutionary importance of fene copy number variation. The models here are Arabidopsis, large trees with a continental range, and mosquito resistance to insecticide.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
With this technique, it is possible to investigate a/symmetry of cell division, lineage switching, multicellular structure development and, of course, tumour tracing, including spatial RNA.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Cell ancestry information can be followed prospective through markers, or retrospectively through mutations and chromatin conformation. Here, they developed methods for tracing ancestry solely from RNAseq, using transcriptional memory (Phillips et al, 2019)
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Cancer cells evolve, and live through selective sweeps, in response to the host and the treatment, and bottleneck effects upon metastasis. But cell heterogeneity is not only genetic, it's chromatin, micro-environment, state etc
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Ioannis Mystakidis from Marcel Tarbier's lab brings lineage-informed perspectives on cell state, fate and heterogeneity in cancer.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
This protein is found on serum proteomics in various diseases, and connected to good prognosis in cancer. It is expressed in higher amounts and in a more polarised fashion as NK cells mature (and are able to kill better). IL-2, IL-15 and IL-18 can trigger extracellular secretion.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Continuously killing demands the proper balance of surface receptors, but also the reloading of the cytotoxic arsenal. The specific protein of today is Ksp37, whose boring name referring to its molecular weight shows how unknown it is, despite being the 6th most expressed protein in NK cells.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Many attempts have been made with NK cell therapy. It's safe, but not very effective. In addition to secreting cytokines, NK secrete other, still not fully understood effectors, which is related to their citotoxicity
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
And ending this section, new SciLife fellow Aline Pfefferle, exploring the secretory dynamics of NK cells. These cells are much easier and cheaper to produce as medical products than e.g. CAR-T cells, since they can be allogenic without a problem.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
More info in: DiMartini et al, Nature Genetics 2025 and Frisch et al, PLOS Pathogens 2025
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Interestingly, one of the main hits was on tRNA; turns out the codon-bias of virulence genes was highly dependent on this particular tRNA, specially the plasmid-related ones!
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
By using random mutagen with transposons, they are studying which genes are necessary and sufficient for infection, both in the chromosome and in the obligatory pINV plasmid.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Shigella invades from the apical side as well as the basal, and can also spread horizontally between cells. Mice are poor models for this pathogen, so organoids are perfect.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Welcoming Maria Letizia Di Martino, from Mikael Sellin's lab. Their lab focuses on intracellular enteropathogens, mostly by using organoids derived from intestinal stem cells.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
More on this, Udayakumar et al, 2026 Dissolving Microneedles Loaded with Lipid Nanocarriers for Vaginal Delivery of Clotrimazole: In Vitro and Ex Vivo Evaluation - PubMed share.google/YdCIDu0xELRB...
share.google
Dissolving Microneedles Loaded with Lipid Nanocarriers for Vaginal Delivery of Clotrimazole: In Vitro and Ex Vivo Evaluation - PubMed
Vaginal yeast infections, such as vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC), affect nearly three out of four women worldwide. Reoccurrence is frequent and requires repeated treatments with oral, antifungal medic...
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
In vitro, the experimental formulation was much more effective than commercial products. Ex vivo, performance was comparable; but the microneedle delivery led to improved clearance of fungi, despite lower drug dosage.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
The microneedles are made by centrifuging the nanoparticle solution over a silicone mold, and then adding an impermeable layer. Tips dissolve fast, but also create a small fissure in the mucosal tissue ex vivo.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
The antifungal clotrimazole is highly apolar, and needs to be carried in lipids; either a lipid-based formulation, or a liposome. With both formulations, drug is released slowly, and it enters but does not cross the tissue.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
The thick vaginal mucus and its fast turnaround time make topical delivery inefficient; microneedles loaded with nanoparticles have the potential to deliver the drug to the mucosa, and possibly combine with probiotics or heating.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
We welcome Paarkavi Udayakumar, from Alexandra Teleki's lab, telling us about microneedle-enabled drug delivery for local treatment of vaginal infections (mostly bacterial vaginosis and candida).
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
These tools are now also available to Swedish users through the Pharmacometabolomics Pilot Unit, part of the drug discovery platform at @scilifelab.se!
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
This can be used e.g. by seeing how humans clear various elements of our diets, and what the individual differences are. This can also provide objective biomarkers of diet compliance, a notoriously hard thing to study; but also to identify subgroups of disease in large cohorts.
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Hugerth lab @h-mel.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
The work horse here is untargeted LC/MS metabolomics. Modifications are found based on their specific molecular mass.
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