MEEHubs26 abstract deadline has been extended to April 26th. Come showcase your awesome Microbiology w. scientists worldwide!
meehubs2026.oa-event.com
🦠 What: awesome conference in microbial ecology and evolution, with hubs around the world
🦠 Where: Sunny* Manchester
🦠 When: 3rd-5th August 2026
🚨 Calling all microbiologists! 🚨
The MEEHubs abstract submission deadline (19/04) is fast approaching. Come showcase your science!!
Submission portal is here: app.oxfordabstracts.com/auth?redirec...
It was a huge pleasure to welcome my former mentor, @unimelb.edu.au 's Prof James Osborne, to @mermanchester.bsky.social this week! Here I am seconds after having embarrassingly dropped several of my cryos on the floor
Read more here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Outstanding MathBio seminar by @olimeacock.bsky.social today at @manchester.ac.uk! Thanks Carl Whitfield and @mermanchester.bsky.social members for great chats
Oli has developed beautiful eco theory on how microbes interact via environmental change 1/2
Thanks Patricia!
Thanks Ben, it means a lot! Keen to hear what you think
It's been a long journey getting this out, but a hugely rewarding one too! Huge thank you to @atejadaarranz.bsky.social, @basler-lab.bsky.social , @raveentank.bsky.social, @brockhurstlab.bsky.social and the fabulous @mermanchester.bsky.social supergroup for all your help!
If pan-resistance were easy, the T6SS wouldn’t be a good weapon, and bacteria would tend to lose it. Instead: toxin-specific resistance appears to be evolutionarily more accessible in our system, enabling attackers to circumvent competitors’ resistances by combining or switching effectors.
So, the fact that we didn’t we see these “pan-resistance” mechanisms evolve in our E. coli helps to explain why so many gram-negative bacteria continue to use the T6SS, along with diverse toxin arsenals.
This specificity was a surprising result: past work has shown that there are several ways in which T6SS attacks can be physically blocked (including by slimy biofilm matrices! academic.oup.com/ismej/articl...), which ought to disable *any* kind of toxin secretion. 🦠🦠🦠
This is just one example, but it highlights a fascinating pattern: evolved resistance against one toxin typically isn’t very helpful against other toxin types.
What’s really cool 🧊🧊🧊, however, is that we see resistance trade-offs arising between different types of T6SS toxin. When the lipase-evolved E. coli are confronted with a different toxin, targeting their call wall, they are actually fare worse than the ancestral strain 😱:
Genetic analyses show us that this resistance arises via loss of specific transporters, such as dctA and sstT, found in the E. coli inner membrane (how?? we still don’t know!)
When we look instead at E. coli cells that have adapted to lipase attacks, the rate of permeabilisation is much lower – i.e. we see strong lipase resistance at the single-cell scale:
Over the 30m timelapse, we see lots E. coli cells turning cyan (SYTOX+), showing that lipase attacks have critically damaged their cell membranes. 🧀🧀🧀
*In fact*, in some cases it can even make things worse. Here’s what happens when ancestral E. coli (green) is attacked by A. baylyi bacteria (red), secreting a membrane-degrading lipase via the T6SS:
[VIDEO TIME!!]
We've found something really cool 🧊: while it’s fairly easy to evolve resistance to T6SS attacks involving only one toxin, this resistance is generally toxin-specific: it doesn’t generally help bacteria if they’re confronted with a different toxin type.
In collaboration with the @basler-lab.bsky.social, and T6SS superstar @atejadaarranz.bsky.social, we probed how E. coli bacteria evolve when confronted with cell wall- and membrane-targeting toxins secreted via the T6SS.
T6SSs are molecular syringes that allow bacteria to inject a diverse array of toxins into rival cells. I’m interested in how gut microbes, like E. coli, adapt to these attacks. If E. coli evolve resistance to one T6SS toxin, does that grant resistance to other types of T6SS attack?
Here’s the latest preprint from my work on evolved resistance to Type VI Secretion system (T6SS) weaponry, funded by a @wellcometrust.bsky.social Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship. So happy to see this out!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New pre-print from us showing how biophysical traits like cell surface hydrophobicity dictate Pseudomonas aeruginosa aggregate architecture & shield cooperators from cheaters. May have relevance for understanding social evolution in chronic infections. 🧬🧫
doi.org/10.64898/202...
🚨 Calling all UK microbiologists 🚨- MEEHubs Registration is now OPEN! Come join our hub at ☀️ @manchester.ac.uk ☀️
How does treatment induced antibiotic resistance happen in real-world infections? We analysed 25k Pseudomonas isolates from 180 patients in a clinical trial to find out! TLDR: The ecological and evolutionary paths are surprisingly diverse & complex even in patients receiving identical treatment…
New preprint!
Ever wondered why only a fraction of genomes encode CRISPR immunity? 🧬 🦠
Turns out CRISPR is rarely beneficial against virulent phages, being most beneficial against those for which resistance mutations are rare!
An epic effort by Rosanna Wright
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🚨 PhD Studentship available! 🚨
We're hiring a UK student to start in Oct '26 via the BBSRC CODEM scheme. Full studentship plus £10k top-up PA. Study the mysterious ZOMBIE PHAGES 🧟 🦠 with our fabulous @mermanchester.bsky.social and @uommib.bsky.social communities!
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
Congratulations also to MERMan's new Bicentenary Fellows, Dr. @matthewjshepherd.bsky.social and Dr. Ryan R Cochrane! Names on doors!!! 🎉
@mermanchester.bsky.social
@manchester.ac.uk
Huge congratulations to @mermanchester.bsky.social 's latest graduate, Dr. Rana Alruthaya, who passed her PhD viva today! Well done Rana!
Our new Microbial Primer describes the mechanistic action and therapeutic potential of R-pyocins produced by P. aeruginosa. www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
Fantastic talk about the impact of inflammation on Pseudomonas aeruginosa evolution by @taoranfu.bsky.social #MicroEvo25
