Early career faculty (Coventry, United Kingdom)
6 Assistant Professor positions are available in the School of Life Sciences with research areas including infectious disease
at University of Warwick
More details: http://iddjobs.org/jobs/2524
Interested in predicting the dynamics of antibiotic resistance? Come work with us! We're looking for two postdocs to develop predictive models of resistance. We're interested in a range of approaches (mathematical & statistical modelling, causal inference, machine learning).
tinyurl.com/6c4y3jke
Join us at the LS2 #Theory #across #Biology chalk talk symposium! 12 June 2026 in Bern, CH. @lifesciswitzerland.bsky.social
No movies that fail, no Mac to PC issues. Only the best ideas and exchange across biology from evolution and ecology to physics of life.
meetings.ls2.ch/theory-acros...
Registration is open for the Microbial Predation Conference 2026!
Abstract submission deadline is May 29th
microbialpredation.ethz.ch/registration...
Just a few days left to apply to one of these postdoc positions in my Unit at @pasteur.fr!
A real pleasure working with Martin Guillemet and many thanks to the reviewersโ whose comments considerably improved the paper.
Our work generalises these ideas to any mechanism giving rise to NFDS.
Similar ideas about strain structure have previously been developed in the context of NFDS arising from allele-specific acquired immunity, most recently in this lovely paper: www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
By comparing allele combinations observed in different pneumococcal populations, we indeed see a signal consistent with selection acting to reinforce existing structure.
Multi-locus NFDS combining to reinforce existing strain structure is interesting. Unlike classical epistasis, this predicts that favoured allele combinations depend on initial conditions - i.e. historical contingency rather than inherent fitness advantage.
The key point is that there is no particular reason to assume NFDS would be neutral (i.e. have no effect) on strain structure.
Here, we develop theory to show that NFDS acting across multiple loci, which maintains diversity, also acts to structure it. Depending on how NFDS is assumed to combine across loci, it can either act to abolish or reinforce existing strain structure.
Recombination acts to destroy these associations, so how is strain structure maintained?
Second, strain structure. Intermediate frequency genes are not randomly distributed across genomes: certain allele combinations are seen together more often than expected, giving rise to strain structure.
First, NFDS: thereโs intriguing data to suggest widespread negative frequency-dependent selection (NFDS) acting across bacterial genomes to maintain intermediate frequency genes. E.g. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New paper: mechanisms that maintain diversity in bacterial genomes also play a role in organising it.
This paper combines two of my favourite topics in bacterial evolution: NFDS and strain structure.
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
๐ฆ How do microbes arrive together, and why does it matter for #microbial #diversity?
๐ Read the paper: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
Published in @plos.org Computational Biology
๐ Congratulations to authors Loรฏc Marrec & Sonja Lehtinen @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social @unil.bsky.social @sib.swiss
Now published: our work using phylodynamics from surveillance data to quantify and experimentally validate the fitness impact of antibiotic resistance determinants & how this changes with patterns of antibiotic use: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I am looking for a PhD student to join my new Socio-Eco-Evo group, hosted in Katie Peichel's Evolutionary Ecology Division @ University of Bern. We're offering a fully funded 4-year position, studying social plasticity and behavioral adaptation among stickleback in Greenland. Please share around!
Evolved plasmid-carrying clones with high copy number contain a mix of full-length and streamlined plasmids. Left: summary of the initial experimental evolution design and nomenclature used for the evolved plasmid-carrying clones. Host strains had either wildtype (w) or increased (m) mutation rate. Treatment indicates the % of plasmid-free hosts added at each passage during evolution. Right: coverage map of evolved clones. Relative coverage of sequencing reads is shown for all clones across R1 sequence length (only the first 50โkb are shown). The AMR region and copies of IS1 are shown against the ancestral R1 (โancโ treatment) coverage map.
Conjugative plasmids help spread AMR genes. @andrewmatthews.bsky.social @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social & @tatianadimitriu.bsky.social show that #AMR loss in evolving populations involves streamlined #plasmids that gain a transmission advantage by deleting AMR genes @plosbiology.org ๐งช plos.io/48NM0BL
Our story on plasmid streamlining is now published in PLoS Biology! With @andrewmatthews.bsky.social and @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social
#MicroSky #Mevosky
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
๐จ Excited to share our new paper is out! ๐
We show how interactions within gut microbiomes allow certain antibiotic-resistant E. coli strains to persist even without antibiotics, helping explain how resistance is maintained in the human gut.
Now published in @natcomms.nature.com rdcu.be/eOf63
Save the date!
๐ฆ๐๐ถ๐๐ ๐ ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฏ๐ถ๐ผ๐บ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐๐บ ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ฎ๐ฒ
The NCCR Microbiomes presents the third edition of the #Swiss #Microbiomes #Forum
๐๏ธ Thursday, Feb 5th 2026
๐ 14h00
๐ EPFL Rolex Learning Center, Lausanne
๐๏ธ Free to attend, but registration is required.
๐ nccr-microbiomes.ch/tech-transfe...
The University of Bern seeks a Professor in Plant Population Ecology (Tenure-Track or Open Rank) to develop a research program and teach. Applications due by 23.01.2026. Details: https://www.ips.unibe.ch/questionnaire/ #job
Love this! I'm so upset this is not available in Switzerland. I'm following it vicariously by listening to Marina Hyde and Richard Osman talk about it on this is entertainment - and now also statistics blogging.
Very proud of @krishnaaswin77.bsky.social first PhD paper and grateful to all the excellent collaborators!
A key motivation for this study was to estimate resistance fitness costs in natura. Itโs interesting they remain so elusive. In these data, we can only quantify effects associated with clearance and establishment, not transmission - so one possibility is that weโd see clearer effects there.
We did find some evidence that resistant strains are worse within-host competitors than sensitive strains, particularly for macrolide resistance. The direction of the overall effect across all analysed antibiotics is consistent with a fitness cost, but with CIs overlapping zero.
We were also interested in quantifying the fitness cost of resistance. We checked whether there's a cost on clearance rate, but resistant strains are associated with lower clearance. We think this is because resistance is more beneficial on longer carried strains. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
We also quantified the fitness effects of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic exposure is associated with a 71% increase in clearance rate of sensitive strains and, interestingly, a 40% increase in the clearance rate of resistant strains.