Such a cool paper @jaytlennon.bsky.social!

“ASM Awards and Prize” text surrounded by olive wreath graphic.

The 2027 ASM Awards & Prize nominations are now open! Make a difference in the career of an outstanding microbiologist by nominating them. There's an Award and Prize to honor scientists at every career level and in every field of the microbial sciences: asm.social/2Sg

Top: Diagram showing Type VI Secretion System–mediated interbacterial antagonism integrated with a computational pipeline used to identify and classify previously uncharacterized antibacterial effector families. Created in BioRender. Bayer-Santos, E. (2026). Bottom left: E. coli toxicity assay. Serial dilutions of E. coli carrying pBRA and pEXT22 constructs. Bottom right: Time-lapse microscopy of E. coli carrying pBRA SP-Tox-Act1 grown on repressed or induced conditions. Scale bar: 5 µm. Timestamps in hours and minutes.

During microbial warfare, #bacteria deploy toxins to inhibit or kill competitors. @ebayersantos.bsky.social &co reveal lipid-targeting #antibacterial #toxins & novel toxin domains within #Salmonella T6SS effectors, broadening known toxin enzymatic diversity @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/40zTyEP

I am still actively looking for postdoc positions — please lmk if you (or your friends and colleagues) need a hardworking postdoc with field, lab, and bioinformatic skills!

I am broadly interested in evolution in the ocean, conservation and population genetics, and rapid evolution.

Estropausal gut microbiota transplant improves measures of ovarian function in adult mice - Nature Aging To investigate the link between the gut microbiome and ovarian health, here the authors transplant gut microbiota from estropausal female mice to young adult female mice. Microbial transplantation imp...

Very cool paper www.nature.com/articles/s43...

The authors found that FMTs from *older* mice into adult females improved ovarian function and lowered inflammation.

FMTs from younger mice into adult mice led to higher inflammation and *reduced* ovarian function in older mice.

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…

Excited to see @cdiener.com's community-scale metabolic models tools getting a shout-out in this @natbiotech.nature.com editorial.

Specifically, mentioning Nick Quinn-Bohmann's recent paper on predicting personalized SCFA production (for precision nutrition): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lack of coevolution should be default assumption, but it’s not, because it’s easy to imagine coevolutionary scenarios

But most microbial populations live very complicated lives

Multi level selection is hard when generation times orders of magnitude different and microbial environments are complex

Very nice to see this out Simon!

Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities Spatial structure naturally emerges in microbial communities, shaping growth, interactions, and evolution, and revealing how microscale processes scale up

Wrapping up a productive week: very glad to have contributed to this review on how spatial structure shapes microbial ecology and evolution, led by @marcelbaecker.bsky.social, @bedutilh.bsky.social, @bramvandijk.bsky.social and many others. doi.org/10.1093/fems...

Cool work from the van Vliet group!

Excited to share first preprint from our lab! @giubotti.bsky.social found that antibiotic tolerance in multispecies biofilms follows a surprising spatial pattern: cells survive only at intermediate distances from a partner species. 🦠 Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...

Heading home after an enlightening couple of days at the Cells to Ecosystems Meeting at the rather scenic Bellairs Research Institute in Barbados! Thanks to @vdumeaux.bsky.social and @hallettmiket.bsky.social for the invite and bringing together people from diametrically opposite research fields!

How do diatom cells maintain a constant supply of carbon for photosynthesis? Our microelectrode measurements of the phycosphere around individual diatom cells show that diatoms can rapidly switch between distinct carbon acquisition pathways. @thembauk.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The hidden energy cost of cellular dormancy Many organisms survive harsh environments by switching into special survival modes. Some bacteria do this by forming spores—dormant, highly resilient cells that can persist for years or even centuries...

www.growkudos.com/publications...

New work with @ckarakoc.bsky.social and @shoestrapped.bsky.social in @pnas.org

Co-occurrence is associated with horizontal gene transfer across marine bacteria independent of phylogeny Abstract. Understanding the drivers and consequences of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a key goal of microbial evolution research. Although co-occurring

Now out & nicely formatted in @isme-microbes.bsky.social

A big analysis of ocean genomes & metagenomes co-led by former postdocs, now PIs, @gmdouglas.bsky.social & @cyanophage.bsky.social along with co-PIs @lbobay.bsky.social & Samuel Chaffron.

A few highlights... 🧵 (1/n)

doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Diagram illustrating early genome erosion during the transition from a free-living Sodalis bacterium to two host-associated endosymbionts inside the long-tailed mealybug. Circular genomes show intact genes in blue and pseudogenes in red, highlighting increased pseudogene accumulation in symbiotic forms. Caption asks: “What are the downstream molecular consequences of early genome erosion?”

Happy to share a preprint—the last chapter of my dissertation with @mcsymbiont.bsky.social and Co—on what happens when bacterial endosymbionts accumulate huge numbers of pseudogenes during early genome reduction.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Very cool read!

What If We Could Choose What We Hear? Shyam Gollakota on AI-Enhanced Hearing — The Experimentalist Mohit Nikalje 

We love science stories that are shaping the technology of tomorrow.

Our latest spotlights Prof. ShyamGollakota and his work on headphones that intelligently tune out the chaos and lock onto the sounds that actually matter.
theexperimentalist.org/behindthedis...
#AI #behindthediscovery

Independent, ongoing clade-specific expansions of IS5 elements in Pseudomonas syringae Insertion sequence (IS) elements are transposable regions of DNA present in a majority of bacterial genomes. It is hypothesized that differences in distributions of IS elements across bacterial strain...

Hey y’all,

New paper out from the lab in Microbial Genomics, starting down the rabbit hole of IS elements in Paeudomonas syringae

www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Happy to share my solo-authored Perspective "An Interpretation, Survey, and Outlook of Microbial Macroecology"! Making time these last few months to take stock of the patterns us microbial ecologists examine + models we invoke has been invaluable. Feedback welcome!

ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

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/...

congrats!

So cool! A neat twist on cross-feeding: Externalization may evolve to relieve toxicity, with interactions emerging as a by-product.

Another product from Dr. Ying-Chih 'Ella' Chuang's time in my lab - bacteria that excrete purines are better equipped to tolerate inhibitory effects of purines, suggesting a physiological basis behind some cross-feeding interactions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to see this published! A big part of why SAR11 is so tricky to grow like "normal" microbes.

Co-convening "The art and science of microbial persuasion" at #ISME20 with Fengping Wang. Cultivation advances: methods, media, uncultured lineages. Coaxing reluctant microbes? Submit your abstract & join us in NZ!

isme.live.ws-django.co.uk/public/confe...
isme.live.ws-django.co.uk/public/confe...

🚨Our new article is out in #PLOS Pathogens!

What drives nestedness in phages–bacteria interactions network in an agro-ecosystem? 🌱

📖 journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

#Phagesky @inrae-pv.bsky.social @phimresearch.bsky.social @phagedirectory.bsky.social

(Yes, that's a phage in those kinetics!)

Screenshot from GRC portal confirming microbial population biology meeting June 27, 2027 in Andover, New Hampshire.

It’s officially happening folks! The Microbial Population Biology Gordon Research Conference is back in Andover, New Hampshire starting June 27th of 2027!
See you there!!

@wcratcliff.bsky.social @ksbakes.bsky.social @surtlab.bsky.social

#microsky #mevosky