Liana Merk

Harvard Biophysics G3 | Eddy Lab | 🧫🥣🌍🧬 | she/her

[Liana Merk @BacteriYay]

(1/7) Very excited to share my first PhD preprint on the interactions of two of my favorite mobile genetic elements: phages and group II introns!

https://t.co/99pFYIYl4r

[Arpan Sarkar @arpsark]

Excited to be a part of this team! Check out our work investigating scientific problem solving in LLMs!

[bioRxiv Bioinfo @biorxiv_bioinfo]

Prevalence of Group II Introns in Phage Genomes https://t.co/7Hvv1cGVpK #biorxiv_bioinfo

[Liana Merk @BacteriYay]

(7/7) We’d love to hear your thoughts, and if you are at the RNA conference in San Diego this week, I am presenting this work at P2-353 in the second poster session!

[Liana Merk @BacteriYay]

(1/7) Very excited to share my first PhD preprint on the interactions of two of my favorite mobile genetic elements: phages and group II introns!

https://t.co/99pFYIYl4r

[Liana Merk @BacteriYay]

(6/7) We highlight a few stories: evidence for retroposition into phage-specific loci, unique CapR domains not reported in gpII intron-encoded homing endonucleases, and the presence of a gpII intron in an annotated Inovirus, the first gpII intron noted in a ssDNA organism.

[Ellie Rand @EllieRand3]

Get ready to dance, our paper – Phage DisCo: targeted discovery of bacteriophages by co-culture – has been pre-printed! 🪩 This has been a really fun project to work on with @implosian, @baym, @nquinoneso, Kesther and Carmen! https://t.co/k04NdEUvss 1/

[Katherine Xue @ksxue]

Thrilled to share that I'm starting my own lab at UC Irvine in April 2025 and am recruiting at all levels - please spread the word! My lab will study how microbes interact and evolve in complex communities like the human gut microbiome. https://t.co/rTuQTul2zj 1/2

[Rafa Pinilla-Redondo @rafapinilla92]

1/8. 𝐧𝐜𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐬 often fly under the radar... but they're vital in bacteria-phage conflicts & beyond. Curious 𝙬𝙝����!? 🤔

Here, we dive into their immune roles, plasticity, and discuss their hidden potential! 🧬🚀
🔗:https://t.co/XI5VANrMrI

[Max Wilkinson @maxewilkinson]

My favourite discovery ever has just come online. Can I please tell you about some seriously wacky molecular biology? The story starts with a reverse transcriptase that SOMEHOW defends bacteria from viruses.

(👇 I recommend sound ON for the video 🎹)
1/

[Dr. Jenny Chen @jjennychenn]

Super excited to share my postdoc work investigating how mating and parental behaviors evolve using wild species of mice combined with single nucleus RNA-sequencing of the hypothalamus 🐭🧠🧬!
https://t.co/tYSFCfOqwP

[Michael Baym @baym]

Thrilled to see the first review article from my lab out in advance @AnnualReviews, helmed by @Celia_Sqe: From Petri Dishes to Patients to Populations:

Scales and Evolutionary Mechanisms Driving Antibiotic Resistance
https://t.co/doWuYeZAfb

[Liana Merk @BacteriYay]

Great work from a great team!!

[Arpan Sarkar @arpsark]

Excited to share our new work (with @KumareshSpikes): "Protein Sequence Domain Annotation using Language Models" (PSALM)

https://t.co/80WSlT0uMp

[Siân Owen @implosian]

Woohoo, our paper on the discovery of 65 new phages dependent on conjugative plasmids is published in it's final form today in @NatureComms ! Here follows a thread (1/ ) https://t.co/8e7gXpAqsv

[Liana Merk @BacteriYay]

@baym @KAMacGillivray @wc_ratcliff It’s always booch time

[Alex Poret @ajporet]

How do bacteria navigate environmental variation in human hosts?

In our newest preprint, we find bacteria can use “permanent” solutions for temporary problems — mutation-mediated phenotypic switching!

See: https://t.co/zMM39luNMk

[Benjamin Good @benjaminhgood]

Excited to share some new work led by Jimmy Ferrare. How do rapidly adapting pop'ns balance short-term selection for fitness & long-term selection for evolvability? We develop a theory to predict how these indirect selection pressures emerge from competition btw linked mutations