Only few weeks left to apply - application deadline is October 31st, 2025.

‼️Please share – our department is looking for new faculty!

The Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology @UF is recruiting a tenure-track Assistant Professor☀️🌴

Link to apply ⬇️
explore.jobs.ufl.edu/en-us/job/53...

Our work highlights Schlafens as an ancient, mechanistically conserved family of immune effectors, revealing the deep evolutionary origin of tRNA-targeting antiviral immunity in humans.

We focused on a system, which we named pSlfn5, that senses tail assembly chaperones of T5-like phages and cleaves tRNA, triggering abortive infection.

We show that its sensor domains are modular and can be swapped to engineer phage specificity.

We found Schlafen nucleases are widespread in prokaryotes, enriched in phage defense islands, and protect bacteria from phage infection.

Prokaryotic Schlafens are fused to diverse domains that likely act as phage sensors and regulate nuclease activity.