Anyone running their lab on Discord instead of Slack? Asking for a friend whose institute very likely won't approve Slack in a foreseeable future, for... regional reasons 😅

Unifying Theories in High-Dimensional Biology: Approaches, Challenges and Opportunities Across biological subdisciplines, the last decade has seen an explosion of high-dimensional datasets, including datasets for cells, species, immune systems, neurons and behaviour. At the ICTS workshop...

arxiv.org/abs/2512.10111

Towards key principles of host-associated microbiome assembly Symbiotic relationships between microbes and host organisms frequently involve the assembly of complex microbial communities (microbiomes) within hosts. Patterns at the community level influence life-...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We’re hiring! 🌱
Join Chang Lab @ Academia Sinica to study the ecology & evolution of plant–microbe symbiosis.
Open positions:
🔹 Postdoctoral Researcher
🔹 Research Assistant

More info 👇
Postdoc www.sinica.edu.tw/recruitment_...
RA: www.sinica.edu.tw/recruitment_...

So excited to see my PhD work finally being published!!!

It was such a pleasure working with a great team!!!

If you’re interested in working with my amazing colleagues (or with me 👀), the PhD program at Academia Sinica is now recruiting!

Apply now for EMBO Workshop "Evolving together: From #genomics to biological interactions" in Taipei, Taiwan, 24–27 Apr 2026.

Abstract submission/Registration deadline: 20 Jan/28 Feb 2026

meetings.embo.org/event/26-bio...
#EMBOEvoGenBio #GeneSky #EvoSky #EcoSky #EMBOevents 🧪

Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics From populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements, conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-replicating g...

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. "Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead."

To “my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.”

www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

Glad to see our phoronid genome study featured on the cover of @currentbiology.bsky.social! It shows how genome structure can be used to test competing hypotheses of nested topology and how derived structural changes provide evidence for monophyly.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Thank you Paul 😊 see you around!

A graphic advertising phage ecology and evolution research at the University of South Carolina, showing a central image of a tide pool flanked by a photo of an agar plate containing diverse microbes and a TEM image of a virus particle.

Very happy to share that I will be starting as an Assistant Professor in the department of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina in January! My group will be working on environmental phage ecology and evolution, and I am recruiting for the upcoming year (more info below).

Thank you Juan!! Feel free lol it's based on quarto

Thank you Mike!!!!

Thank you!!!

Excited to share that I’ll be starting my research group in Nov 2025 at the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica in Taipei🎉

We study how eco & evo rules govern complex systems layered by hosts🌱& symbionts🦠 & mobile genes🧬

Recruiting soon at all levels!
🔗 chang-yu-chang.github.io/changlab/

I'm super bummed to be missing #ESEB2025 @eseb2025.bsky.social due to a cancelled flight! Here's a quick overview of my talk "Gene- and genome-focused perspectives on microbial pangenomes" slated to be part of The Evolution of Microbial Pangenomes -- which I recommend you attend tomorrow (Fri) !
1/n

Do plasmids evolve faster 🐇, slower 🐢, or just like chromosomes 🧬?

In our new paper, we tackled this question using theory, simulations, bioinformatics, and experiments!

👇 Check out all the details in Paula’s thread!

Hint: 🐇 (most of the time)

New paper in @nature.com! With @kiseokmicro.bsky.social , Siqi Liu, Kyle Crocker, Jojo Wang, Mikhail Tikhonov & Madhav Mani — a massive dataset and simple model reveal a few conserved regimes that capture how soil microbiome metabolism responds to perturbations. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How may theoretical ecology & evolutionary theory push microbiology forward?
At Environmental Microbiology, I am commissioning a series of Perspectives exploring that question. Excited to share them in the 🧵 below
The series is open, so do get in touch if you'd like to propose a new contribution!

A beautifully simple model reveals the nitrogen dynamics in soil in response to pH! Congrats to the authors! @kiseokmicro.bsky.social

Our paper demonstrating that within-species warfare interactions are ecologically important on human skin is now published in Nature Micro! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution The purpose of these awards is to provide support for students entering U.S.-based Ph.D. programs with a plan to perform research in ecology and evolution. While we will consider all projects in ecolo...

I would love to host a PhD student on my lab with strong quantitative training interested in projects integrating ecology and evolution, or cell physiology and ecological dynamics
www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

How many paths lead to evolutionary innovation? How versatile are genomic toolkits? Excited to announce my new @pnas.org paper addressing these questions in collaboration with @rokaslab.bsky.social, @hittingerlab.bsky.social, and the Pennell lab!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution The purpose of these awards is to provide support for students entering U.S.-based Ph.D. programs with a plan to perform research in ecology and evolution. While we will consider all projects in ecolo...

Get the word out far and wide. New opportunity from the Simons Foundation in the Eco-Evo space.

2026 Simons Graduate Fellowship in Ecology and Evolution Awards, due July 31, 2025, only for incoming PhD students who plan to start their PhDs in Fall 2026.

www.simonsfoundation.org/grant/simons...

Enjoying the new Michael Lynch perspective in PNAS, and not just because it validates my love of microbes.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Macroecological patterns in experimental microbial communities Author summary Determining whether an empirical pattern can be manipulated is a crucial step towards building a predictive theory. Our study aimed to determine the extent that experimental manipulatio...

Macroecological patterns in experimental microbial communities, led by Will Shoemaker & Jacopo Grilli
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Quantifying phage infectivity from characteristics of bacterial population dynamics A frequent goal of phage biology is to quantify how well a phage kills a population of host bacteria. Unfortunately, traditional methods to quantify phage success can be time-consuming, limiting the t...

Excited to see this new, and extensively-rewritten, version of our preprint up now! With @paulturnerlab.bsky.social we show how bacterial population dynamics (e.g. growth curves) can be used to accurately quantify bacteriophage infectivity

🦠 🧫🔬 #microbiology #VirEvol

doi.org/10.1101/2023...

Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very excited about this work by @mrazo.bsky.social in collaboration with www.madhavmani.com bsky.app/profile/mraz... I am so lucky to be able to collaborate with such brilliant people! Learned a lot. This is our first foray into ML approaches and I am quite taken with their power 1/n