Great article about EvolvingSTEM & Dr. Abigail Matela's leadership to infuse dozens of schools w/ authentic microbiology research experiences that demonstrate evolution in real time.
We've engaged more than 11,000 students over 11 years! 😅 🧪 🧫
www.hotmetalcampus.com/news-researc...
Multiple fully funded PhD/postdoc positions available: experimental evolution of tumour suppression, egalitarian & fraternal ETIs, jumbo phage ecology & genetics. Related EoIs welcome.
Email CV/statement of motivation written in own words. Open until filled.
Grateful for reposting 🙏
@vscooper.micropopbio.org & @isabelott.bsky.social let me crash their high-school bacteria hunt while I was working on my book "Life's Edge." Their paper's now out, featuring lots of mutants (including my very own CZ1A).
Now out in AEM @asm.org! 🎉🧪
*High school student-isolated mutants 👉🏻 novel genetic causes of biofilm-associated adaptations
*We learn how diversity arises quickly and is maintained
*EvolvingSTEM enables scalable research in classrooms & promotes scientific literacy
journals.asm.org/eprint/FBU9M...
So happy to see this finally published in @plosbiology.org!
This is the first chapter of @julielebris.bsky.social PhD thesis demonstrating how capsules are exchanged by plug-and-play dynamics
w/ @epcrocha.bsky.social
#microsky @klebclub.bsky.social
Link below-
Check out her 🧵 for more details!
Happy to have participated in this beautiful work on the human gut resistome in populations exposed to minimal anthropogenic pollution 🥳. Do not miss it!
We are pleased to share our last article rdcu.be/fabhM. It offers the most comprehensive analysis so far of Ab+non-Ab resistance genes in human gut microbiome, using an Indigenous population (low industrialization, chronic Hg exposure from gold mining) 6/6👇
New preprint alert!!! 🚀🤓 We are very happy to finally share this with the world — the result of seven years of work and a new tool to study integrons and discover new functions encoded in these bacterial platforms.
If you want to know more, here is a thread 🧵
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Am stoked and thrilled that our latest paper is now out. A longitudinal study of invasive E. coli from children in the Netherlands over 50 years
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Out Now! Plasmids promote antimicrobial resistance through insertion sequence-mediated gene inactivation #MicroSky
Check out the latest version of our paper — peer-reviewed, polished, and published. Hope you like it!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Excited to share our latest work! 📝
We measured the fitness effect of 136 AMR genes and found that many are neutral or even beneficial without selection. 🤯🧬
Oxygen availability can flip their fitness and our stochastic model indicates that oxygen fluctuations help maintain them.
Learn more 👇🏼
New preprint on the limits of detecting higher-order interactions in microbial communities.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We find that the dominance of additive and pairwise interactions on community function may not reflect biological simplicity, but fundamental limits of statistical detection.
Given that clonal biofilms of single bacterial species rapidly diversify into niche specialists, how do biofilms of multiple species evolve?
A 🧵 featuring new collaborative pubs:
1. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
2. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🚨 New pre-print! 🚨 In the largest study of its kind to-date, we investigate the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms driving within-patient evolution of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Read here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... , and follow along with this thread, discussing our findings (1/21)
What a fantastic new addition to my lab! 🚀
Welcome @albertohca.bsky.social to the @uam.es family! Stay tuned for the science we’re going to build together in the coming years!
🧵 New preprint! Our 4-lab team evolved Streptococcus pneumoniae in antibiotic-treated mice of varying immune states and discovered something surprising: bacteria rarely evolved resistance. Instead, they found a different way to survive — by rewiring RNA turnover.
🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New paper out in PNAS!!! 🎉
Do more plasmid copies mean faster evolution?
🧵 Dive into the story
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
New paper out in @pnas.org, and it made the cover! 👁️
We represent plasmids as circles and mutations as dots, resembling an eye, because in this paper we literally 𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ plasmids evolve.
‼️Check Paula’s 🧵 and the paper👇
𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘀𝗺𝗶𝗱 𝗺𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗰𝗼𝗽𝘆 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Emerging advances in prokaryotic transposition: TnPedia as a promising tool www.cell.com/trends/micro... #jcampubs
Bacteria chromosomes contain Genomic Islands that provide virulence, antibiotic resistance, MGE-defence,... They transfer between cells, but the mechanism of most remains elusive.
Here we explore the conjugative capacity of these mysterious Genomic Islands.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New preprint from the lab!
Stress-Induced Cooperation Promotes Tolerance in Resource-Limited Auxotrophic Microbial Consortia.
Great and long journey with great collaborators.
We’re very happy to share the results from the last chapter of my PhD, now out as a preprint on bioRxiv
www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...
Microbial Evolution: Impacts on Human Health Call for Papers A defining characteristic of infectious diseases is that they evolve. The consequences of this evolution are among the most pressing medical issues facing humanity, including emerging pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and the success or failure of vaccines. Pathogen evolution profoundly influences virulence, transmission, and responses to a broad array of human interventions. While the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens have historically been challenging to study, large-scale genomic sequencing, novel computational tools, and experimental methods are rapidly changing the field. We encourage submissions on the broad topic of the evolution of infectious diseases. This Special Issue aims to feature research that blends evolutionary approaches to understanding pathogen heterogeneity and ongoing genetic change in clinical samples and models of human infection. It also seeks to highlight opportunities to design treatment and prevention strategies that remain effective in the face of ongoing pathogen evolution. Submission – open until January 31, 2027 Guest editors Robert Woods, MD PhD, University of Michigan Camilo Barbosa, PhD, University of Michigan Silvie Huijben, PhD, Arizona State University
🚨Call for papers🚨
Microbial Evolution: Impacts on Human Health
in the society journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health
Guest Editors: Bob Woods, Silvie Huijben & Camilo Barbosa
EIC: me
This will be great, please submit and share!
academic.oup.com/emph/pages/m...
New preprint from my lab (with Arya Kaul, @fernpizza.bsky.social, and @brinda.eu), in which we explore new genes hitchhiking on the beneficial deletion that fused them together, and find them in the LTEE, M. Tb/bovis, and across the bacterial tree of life
🚨🚨🚨
We're looking for a research tech to work on alt splicing, pancreatic islets and diabetes. The goal is to set a high-throughput platform to investigate the role of alternative exons in beta cell biology!
Interested in joining our lab at @melisupf.bsky.social? 👇
www.upf.edu/documents/d/...
Preprint alert📢!
Ever wondered how much bacterial parasites influence evolutionary outcomes of their host?
➡️ We co-evolved two bacterial strains in conditions in which the costs and benefits of prophage carriage varied
Here is what we found.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#MicroSky #PhageSky
🧵
It was great to write a brief commentary with @sociovirology.bsky.social on @nanamikubota.bsky.social and @vscooper.micropopbio.org's recent discovery of cheat-driven cycles in Pseudomonas (www.cell.com/current-biol... - amazing example of the tragedy of the commons!
🧪 #socialviruses #evosky
What is the best strategy to win any contest?
Eliminate your opponents of course.
Recently, my friend @fernpizza.bsky.social showed how plasmids compete intracellularly (check out his paper published in Science today!). With @baym.lol, we now know they can fight.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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/...