The Townsend Lab

How do you say goodbye to yesterday? We put a big brick plaque on the future. Bon Voyage Professor @KaurTweets. We spent the best 6 years as friends, collaborators, travelers...with chain link resilience. Carpe diem at your new home in @thisisUIC. They are lucky to have this doc!

1 lab radically shaking up biology's floor is easily @delafuentelab who visited @PSUmBiome today. AI in biology will not be the same after the work, which notably was hard to get funded; and people did not believe it would yield just 5-10 years ago. Big social lessons there!

In this article, Ginnan et al. propose that the One Health framework needs a shift in focus from disease surveillance to microbial stewardship. An integrative One Health microbiome science approach breaks down traditional silos in microbiome research: journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mb…

🎉 Big news! @PennState ranks 24th in the U.S. and 82nd globally in the 2026 @worlduniranking — and the One Health Microbiome Center got a shoutout for our role in advancing global microbiome science! 🌎🦠 Full story 👉 psu.edu/news/academics… #OneHealth #Microbiome #PennState

Every machine in a Hospital that diagnoses your body without cutting you open is based on a principle of Physics, discovered by a Physicist who had no interest in Medicine. If you think the world doesn’t need Basic Science, or that somehow Science has failed you, think again.

@jutraslab 👀

🦠💥 New from @GETxLAB : Simple sugars disrupt gut Bacteroides by inhibiting the key regulator Cur. ATP-dependent FBP synthesis controls this — linking sugar-rich diets to changes in gut fitness & host interactions. Full paper 👉 nature.com/articles/s4146… #Microbiome #GutHealth

The bacteria dominating your gut #microbiome power their #metabolism with pyrophosphate rather than ATP. @SethKabonick and squad shows that ATP-dependent FBP synthesis instead controls their carbohydrate utilization regulator. nature.com/articles/s4146…

Just one single gut bacteria is astonishingly sufficient to repress the antibiotic-resistant C. difficile infection. A real game changer from @PSUmBiome executive committee member @JordanBisanz and Co. AI and synthetic communities boiled it down. psu.edu/news/research/…

New paper from the lab out today on Akkermansia muciniphila and how it breaks down host glycans! @IMIBirmingham @unibirm_CMH Very proud of my group, especially @CassieBakshani who did an amazing job. @NatureMicrobiol nature.com/articles/s4156…

Hierarchical glycolytic pathways control the carbohydrate utilization regulator in human gut Bacteroides biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #biorxiv_micrbio

🔥 Hot off the press! 🔬🤖 AI is decoding microbial messages in milk to boost safety testing and improve quality. 🥛Great collab with @IBM and @Cornell Learn more: bit.ly/MilkSafetyAI Read the full study: bit.ly/AI-MicrobiomeS… #FoodSafety #AI #Microbiome #Milk @PSUmBiome

We're thrilled to lift another veil of our partnership with @QIAGEN and @PSUmBiome as we build towards creating the best industry-academic experience in the one health microbiome sciences at @penn_state and @huckinstitutes. Much more to come. youtube.com/watch?v=cdOOsK…

Today in #ANSC456 our undergrad Ethan Smith is teaching the basics of R in Penn State’s ROAR supercomputer. For PIs out there: Ethan will be looking for grad mentors soon! He was introduced to coding during my class last year and is now teaching it. 🤓#proud

@EA_Proctor Congratulations! Well deserved tears.

I have mixed feelings about this photo being taken after I’d been happy-sobbing for 10 minutes, but I MADE IT — tenured and promoted! Profoundly grateful to my lab, my mentors, my family, and the colleagues who wrote letters supporting me ❤️ stay tuned, more great things to come!

Alright stop, collaborate and listen, #phageWO is back with a brand new invention. Developing sperm is in yellow. Long noncoding RNA is in blue. Cytoplasmic incompatibility depletes this blue messenger to initiate the catastrophic cascade leading to paternal-effect lethality.

🦠We are getting excited for the One Health Microbiome Symposium, taking place on May 30-31st at the University Park campus! This year's symposium will feature Dr. Paul Schulzef-Lefert from @UniCologne @mpipz_cologne, giving a talk on understanding plant root #microbiota. 🌿

I am still looking for postdocs to join my lab. I have several NIH-funded positions to work either on Acinetobacter pathogenesis or OMV biogenesis in Bacteroides. Please RT.

Your PI back from summer vacation

🚨Microbiome Job Alert🚨 We're hiring a postdoc to develop and study plant-associated disease suppressive microbial communities! This is a multi-year USDA funded project 🍅🌱🦠 Please RT!!! Apply here -> rb.gy/r1wk2 Recent paper -> rb.gy/vhxae 1/2