Looking for something new to integrate into an #evolution or #microbiology course? Useful for lectures, labs, homework?

Have a look at our STEPS program, which simulates bacterial evolution, including the #LTEE. Easy web-based interface & lab manual w/ exercises to help develop students' intuition.

This was an amazing collaboration with Ayari Fuentes @ayari.bsky.social, Rafael Peña @penamiller.bsky.social, Maria Rebolleda @mrebolleda.bsky.social, Haydeé de Luna and Fernando Santos.
Thanks to everyone who supported this work 💛
Happy to chat about it!

Lastly, we explored the robustness and broader implications of these dynamics, identifying regimes where tolerance is maintained or lost.

We observed that Stress-induced cooperation promotes tolerance, allowing coexistence or persistence under harsh conditions.
** Cooperation becomes a stabilizing mechanism.

As stress increases, interaction outcomes shift — cooperation can become favored over competition.
Stress acts as a key driver of interaction structure.

In this paper, we combined theory and experiments to study how stress can induce cooperation, and how this cooperation can promote tolerance under resource limitation.

* * Stress doesn’t always break systems — sometimes it reorganizes them.

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...

We observed that Stress-induced cooperation promotes tolerance, allowing coexistence or persistence under harsh conditions.
** Cooperation becomes a stabilizing mechanism.

As stress increases, interaction outcomes shift — cooperation can become favored over competition.
Stress acts as a key driver of interaction structure.

In this paper, we combined theory and experiments to study how stress can induce cooperation, and how this cooperation can promote tolerance under resource limitation.

* * Stress doesn’t always break systems — sometimes it reorganizes them.