The Bel Lab, boldly going where no one else bothers to. Associate Professor at @UWMadisonMMI. Yes, I need to update my website. Opinions are my microbiota's.
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🚨🚨 THE MUCUS IS COMING TO AMERICA!! I'm excited to announce that I will be joining the wonderful @UWMadisonMMI to keep exploring the wonders of mucus! This would not have been possible without @VanessaSperand2 @markjmandel, Federico Rey, JD Sauer and many more at MMI.
Please help us welcome our new faculty member Dr. Shai Bel! The Bel lab uses state-of-the-art mouse models, combined with high resolution microscopy and molecular biology to understand how the intestine functions.
mmi.wisc.edu/meet-our-resear…
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Shai Bel retweeted
Out now in NAR! Amir Erez and I wanted to use the huge amount of soil metagenomic data out there to learn about how bacteria adapt to living with plants. But most short DNA reads from soil can’t be identified —> academic.oup.com/nar/article…
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Shai Bel retweeted
🧵New paper out in @mSystems! We mapped the pan-genome #T6SS effector arsenal of #Pantoea agglomerans. The surprise: its weapons live in dynamic genomic armories that mix antibacterial attack with anti-phage defense. 1/n doi.org/10.1128/msystems.011…
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Shai Bel retweeted
Excited to share our new preprint! 🧬
AXL×PD-1 bispecific brings T cells into contact with AXL⁺ cells, enhances tumor killing, and reshapes the immune landscape in anti–PD-1-resistant HNSCC models—outperforming combined anti-AXL + anti-PD-1 treatment.
🔗 biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
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Shai Bel retweeted
1/2) Preprint alert!
How do embryos know when it’s time to wake up?
To uncover the molecular machinery behind this remarkable decision, we combined single-embryo RNA-seq with cross-species drug screens, revealing how HSP90 links temperature and hormone signaling to break dormancy
Made with AI
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The responses to this post are almost as shocking as the picture itself. Scientists who need animals for their work must adhere to strict ethical standards and respect them. There are many ways to advance medicine and subjecting mice to this level of harm isn't one of them.
"All animal experiments were carried out according to Institutional Animal Care Guidelines and were ethically approved by the Administration Committee of Experimental Animals, with the approval of Nantong University, Jiangsu, China." 🤡
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Shai Bel retweeted
The Blekhman Lab is at the Cold Spring Harbor Microbiome meeting next week 👇
Come see presentations by Tess Brunner, JJ Colgan, Pamela Ferretti, and Sambhawa Priya (@sambhawa_priya)!
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‼️💥
With all of the political maddness going on, I forgot to post about our latest preprint.
A short thread with link at the end:
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This work was a collaboration with @TPilpel. Years ago, our two labs discovered SECReTE, a cis-element that is enriched in mRNAs encoding secreted or membrane proteins (secretome). SECReTE is a degenerate motif, defined as at least 10 consecutive NNY or NYN triplets (N – any nucleotide, Y – U or C). This motif enhances mRNA localization to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and promotes higher levels of the secreted protein product.
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Shai Bel retweeted
Bar-Ilan University researchers found that antibiotics can directly alter immune function, even without gut bacteria.
In mice, vancomycin changed feeding behavior, disrupted biological clocks, and suppressed immune-related gene expression in the colon.
nature.com/articles/s41564-0…
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Shai Bel retweeted
A candidate for the U.S. Senate says Israel is not America's friend.
I'm Israeli. I grew up in Israel. My family is Israeli. And I can tell you this: Few nations hold America as close to their hearts as Israelis do. Fact: Israelis admire America. 81% of Israelis view the United States favorably - the highest percentage among 36 countries surveyed by Pew in 2026. Who else in the Middle East does?
No other U.S. ally can have 200 fighter jets in the sky in 3 hours notice. Modest compared with America's military might, certainly. But backed by something more important: a profound commitment to the United States, regardless of who occupies the White House. Security is real. Capabilities are real. And friendship is real too. This candidate understands nothing of it. He is trying to pick up votes through hate.
None of this requires defending Netanyahu. None of it requires endorsing everything Israel has done in recent years.
It requires understanding one fact: Israel America's most enduring ally in the Middle East.
Criticizing an Israeli government is legitimate. Pretending Israel is America's enemy is something else entirely.
Any other notion is just bigotry masquerading as conspiracy theory- or conspiracy theory masquerading as bigotry.
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Some of my thoughts about the surge in AI-generated papers, why this feels like a completely new kind of problem, and what this means for how we evaluate science in biology.
Out now in PLOS Biology:
journals.plos.org/plosbiolog…
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Shai Bel retweeted
Disentangling microbiota-dependent and -independent impacts of antibiotics on host physiology dlvr.it/TVz97T #MicroSky
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🚨🚨 When we take antibiotics we assume they'll kill the bad bugs but won't affect us directly. In our new story @NatureMicrobiol , we found that's not always the case and developed a tool, CompoRes, to identify these direct effects on the host /1
nature.com/articles/s41564-0…
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All our data, along with CompoRes, are public, so you can check and see how the host and microbiota respond to the antibiotic of your choosing before you perform your experiment. We hope the community will find our resource useful /10
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This work was a massive effort by all our lab members. It was spearheaded by Lilach Zelik, Yehonatan Levin and Jasmin Sawaed. I'd like to thank @atins88 @emc_white for working with us to improve our manuscript and helping us bring this resource to the community. /end
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