Kate Beckham
banner
kshbeckham.bsky.social
Kate Beckham
@kshbeckham.bsky.social
Royal Society University Research Fellow | NUAcT Fellow @ Newcastle University @mhd-newcastle.bsky.social

Investigating mycobacterial transport systems
#structuralbiology #microbiology

Instagram @kshbeckham
Pinned
Keep up to date with all the latest from the MHD theme ✨
Now we are on Bluesky, over the next couple of days we would like to introduce some of the MHD groups on Bluesky who you can follow for more research updates. Or check out our handy MHD starter pack 😀
go.bsky.app/SoVnvW3
Good news! Erasmus is a great scheme. www.bbc.com/news/article...
UK will rejoin Erasmus student scheme in 2027
The UK left in December 2020 as part of the post-Brexit trade deal with the EU negotiated by Boris Johnson.
www.bbc.com
December 17, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
It’s so nice to work with such brilliant people, thanks to @kshbeckham.bsky.social and team for organising our microbes in health and disease theme festive gathering!🎄
Fab afternoon at the MHD festive gathering 🎉 congratulations to the winning quiz team and @johncorrigall.bsky.social for most festive outfit.
December 15, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Fab afternoon at the MHD festive gathering 🎉 congratulations to the winning quiz team and @johncorrigall.bsky.social for most festive outfit.
December 15, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Truly heroic effort by Robin Lissner in
@wilbertbitter.bsky.social's group to knock out every single lipoprotein in Mycobacterium marinum. He found a lot of cool stuff, and we were fortunate to help out with some of it. Check out the paper here: journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
journals.asm.org
December 12, 2025 at 9:16 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is an outlier in many ways. One of them is keeping a high degree of functional redundancy despite its obligate pathogen lifestyle. In this review, we reflect on the biological meaning of M. tuberculosis functional redundancies.

journals.plos.org/plospathogen...
Essential redundancies fuel Mycobacterium tuberculosis adaptation to the host
Redundancy in biology is, at a glance, counterintuitive because if the function of two gene products completely overlaps then, throughout the course of evolution, one of the genes will likely accumula...
journals.plos.org
December 7, 2025 at 12:07 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Thrilled to see our Kiwa story out today! A membrane-associated supercomplex that senses infection and blocks replication and transcription.

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Huge congratulations to Yi and Zhiying for bringing it home, to Thomas for starting us off, and to all the collaborators.
Kiwa is a membrane-embedded defense supercomplex activated at phage attachment sites
Zhang, Todeschini, and Wu et al. show that the bacterial defense system Kiwa senses phage attachment at the membrane and assembles a transmembrane complex that halts infection by blocking phage DNA re...
www.cell.com
July 28, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
If you or someone you know is looking for a post-doctoral position working on mycobacterial envelope biology, please get in touch. I am recruiting here at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.
December 2, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Great to have you in Newcastle @matthiaswilmanns.bsky.social
Fantastic to have Prof Matthias Wilmanns from EMBL Hamburg hosted by @kshbeckham.bsky.social to give a @mhd-newcastle.bsky.social seminar on mycobacterial infection #dreamtheme
December 2, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Today, we are lucky to have Imane El Meouche from IAME, France to give a MCM seminar @medicalsciencesncl.bsky.social (chaired by @henrikstrahl.bsky.social) on antibiotics tolerance in E. Coli
December 1, 2025 at 1:07 PM
👀 nice was to illustrate :)
www.nature.com/articles/s41... I'm really liking the author's use of googly eyes in this paper 😀
December 1, 2025 at 12:36 PM
Nice work, congratulations all :)
November 27, 2025 at 12:14 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Type VII ABC transporters underpin many core activities in the bacterial cell envelope - including efflux, cell division and lipoprotein trafficking.

A new paper in PLOS Biology reveals YbbAP-TesA as a novel Type VII system in E. coli.

dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...
Structural characterization of the YbbAP-TesA ABC transporter identifies it as a lipid hydrolase complex that extracts hydrophobic compounds from the bacterial inner membrane
In E.coli, three of the four Type VII ABC transporter systems have been structurally characterized. This study solves cryo-EM structures of the fourth Type VII ABC system, YbbAP-TesA, and suggests tha...
dx.plos.org
November 26, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Now properly published at @natcomms.nature.com with few additional experiments incl. demonstration of Daptomycin's ability to depolarise non-growing cells.
See the original preprint-thread for a summary of our findings.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#microsky
November 24, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Take a look through the Instruct-ERIC Facility starter pack!

Find the technology and expertise in structural biology that you need, and receive funded access to any of these facilities through Instruct - bsky.app/starter-pack...
November 24, 2025 at 9:27 AM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
We are delighted to share a stunning short/long chain acyl-CoA carboxylase complex with a total of 16 subunits (8 x AccA3, 2 x AccD4, 4 x AccD5, 2 x AccE5). It hosts two related carboxylate transferase subunits (AccD4, AccD5). Our story is now on www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.15.688623v1
Architecture of an asymmetric mycobacterial short chain/long chain acyl-CoA carboxylase
Endogenous extraction has revealed a mycobacterial hybrid acyl-CoA carboxylase (ACCase) complex exhibiting distinct long-chain (LC) and short-chain (LC) acyl-CoA carboxyl transferase (CT) activities. ...
www.biorxiv.org
November 18, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Looking for a PhD opportunity in Microbiology? Consider joining one of the UK's leading microbiology research clusters at Newcastle University. See the thread for MRC DTP studentships currently advertised. @medicalsciencesncl.bsky.social @sagencl.bsky.social @cbcb-newcastle.bsky.social #microsky
November 4, 2025 at 10:54 AM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
🚨 PhD opportunity! 🚨
Join us at St Andrews to study how multiple prophages shape bacterial behaviour & AMR.
Co-supervised with @tatianadimitriu.bsky.social
This is a competition-based EASTBIO PhD.
Full details and the application link are in the advert 👇
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
EASTBIO: When Phages Collide: Understanding How Multiple Prophages Shape Bacterial Behaviour at University of St Andrews on FindAPhD.com
PhD Project - EASTBIO: When Phages Collide: Understanding How Multiple Prophages Shape Bacterial Behaviour at University of St Andrews, listed on FindAPhD.com
www.findaphd.com
November 17, 2025 at 3:13 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Happy to share our latest NAR paper on Rel toxins targeting M. tuberculosis anti-SD region, with Tim Blower’s team (@durham.ac.uk @nebiolabs.bsky.social) and Laurent Falquet
Thanks to FRM @frm-officiel.bsky.social and CNRS @cnrsbiologie.bsky.social
academic.oup.com/nar/article-...
November 17, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Architecture of an asymmetric mycobacterial short chain/long chain acyl-CoA carboxylase https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.15.688623v1
November 16, 2025 at 3:17 AM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
PhD opportunity in the lab of a young PI who’s simply going stratospheric, on using #phage for water treatment. What’s not to like? You can’t miss this chance.
#microsky #phagesky
🚨 PhD Opportunity 🚨
Interested in microbiology, phages & water security?
Join me and Prof Cindy Smith to test phages as a sustainable alternative to chlorine in drinking-water biofilters.
Metagenomics, phage discovery & ecology — all in one exciting project!
Apply: www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvl...
November 15, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
‘The latest surveillance data found that the number of antibiotic-resistant infections in 2024 equated to an average of nearly 400 newly reported cases a week.’
www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
Deaths linked to antibiotic-resistant superbugs rose 17% in England in 2024
Data also shows an average of nearly 400 newly reported cases of antibiotic-resistant infections a week last year
www.theguardian.com
November 13, 2025 at 11:27 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
🚨Attention prospective PhD students🚨
Are you interested in molecular mechanisms, RNA viruses, structural biology or biophysics? 🧬🦠🧪

We have THREE fully-funded PhD projects available for October 2026 entry:
www.findaphd.com/phds/?Keywor...

Please share/repost, and get in touch if you're interested
chris hill PhD Projects, Programmes & Scholarships - 3 PhDs Listed
FindAPhD. Search Funded PhD Projects, Programmes & Scholarships in chris hill. Search for PhD funding, scholarships & studentships in the UK, Europe and around the world.
www.findaphd.com
November 13, 2025 at 7:54 PM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Pleased to see this collaboration with a great PhD student Pei Cing Ng, from Prof. Luning Liu's lab at Liverpool University published. Structure of the H. neapolitanus carbonic anhydrase and localisation in a mini-carboxysome: www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....
November 13, 2025 at 9:57 AM
Reposted by Kate Beckham
Second talk was from Prof. Frank Sargent with an interesting talk on TXSS. Another set of brilliant talks from the #dreamtheme, with plenty of further reading, thanks to speakers, @dave-bolam.bsky.social chairing and the other organisers from the theme!
November 12, 2025 at 9:56 AM