Thank you so much, Laura! I really hope so too, it would be so fun to cross paths at a conference this year!!

Thanks, Julia!!!

Thank you, Jillian 🤗

Endless thanks to Irene Newton, Katy Heath, Rachel Whitaker, Adam Dolezal, many other mentors/collaborators/friends, the entire Newton Lab, and all the amazing students I’ve worked with through my PhD & postdoc!

Interested in joining the lab or collaborating? I’d love to hear from you! You can use my current website as a reference (liliancaesar.com) - Caesar Lab version coming soon 😊

I am thrilled to share that this fall I’ll be joining the University of Oklahoma School of Biological Sciences (@ou.edu) as an Assistant Professor! The Caesar Lab will study the ecology and evolution of host-microbiome interactions in social bees (honey bees, stingless bees and more) 🦠🐝

Endless thanks to Irene Newton, Katy Heath, Rachel Whitaker, Adam Dolezal, many other mentors/collaborators/friends, the entire Newton Lab, and all the amazing students I’ve worked with through my PhD & postdoc!

Interested in joining the lab or collaborating? I’d love to hear from you! You can use my current website as a reference (liliancaesar.com) - Caesar Lab version coming soon 😊

What good is modeling? Introducing biology students to theory Theory and empirical science should be in constant dialogue, but often find it hard to understand one another. Here we describe a graduate-level university course we developed to improve matters. The ...

Preprint: What good is modeling? Introducing biology students to theory - arxiv.org/abs/2604.13344 - how to teach and think about what modeling contributes to science. How does it fit into the scientific method? This is often misunderstood.

We (with @dornhaus.bsky.social) finally wrote up our class on how to teach modeling to biologists, which ends up being a non-trivial exercise in understanding the roles that theory plays in the scientific method. We hope others will use our class, or simply enjoy the manuscript!

How to measure microbiome health?

Commentary proposes adaptive coherence: capacity of host-microbiome systems to sustain integrated function via reorganization. Reframes health as emergent & relational, w/measurements of adaptability/functional integrity
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

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 journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Bumble bees (Bombus spp.) play a vital role in the provision of ecosystem services that benefit humans through crop pollination and supporting natural plant biodiversity. While their ecological function is well studied, the microbial communities within their gut are only beginning to be recognized for their contributions to bee health and resilience. To better understand these communities, we conducted a meta-analysis of 814 gut samples from 15 studies across 9 countries. This analysis confirmed Snodgrassella, Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium, Bombilactobacillus, and Gilliamella as core gut taxa, and proposed the addition of Neisseriaceae_unclassified and Orbaceae_unclassified. Human-altered environments were identified as the most influential factor shaping microbiota composition, with indoor versus outdoor rearing showing the strongest effect. Outdoor bees collectively hosted 253% more genera and exhibited higher microbial richness, connectivity, and stability. In contrast, indoor bees showed reduced diversity and the loss of multiple environmentally-associated taxa. Based on these patterns, we propose a “captivity-sensitive core” of twelve taxa, including Frischella, Apilactobacillus, Staphylococcus, and Acinetobacter. These findings establish a robust reference for the bumble bee gut microbiome and highlight how anthropogenic environments alter microbial community structure, with implications for insect pollinator health, management, and conservation.

Anthropogenic stressors drive microbiome assembly: a global meta-analysis of #bumblebees. Exciting research, led by Christine Macpherson @uofguelph.bsky.social, reveals the impacts of human-altered environments in shaping the communities of microorganisms in #bee guts: doi.org/10.1016/j.sc...

Unbinned contigs expand known diversity in the global microbiome Nature Microbiology, Published online: 03 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02314-6Re-analysis of over 92,000 metagenomes reveals hundreds of thousands of previously undescribed Bacterial and Archaeal clades hidden in plain sight.

Out Now! Unbinned contigs expand known diversity in the global microbiome #MicroSky

Experimental Sodalis infection eliminates ancient insect symbiont - Nature Communications Many insects harbour bacterial endosymbionts that provide them with essential nutrients. Here, Krüsemer et al. show that introduction of a tractable bacterium into a beetle host leads to efficient ver...

experimental symbiont replacement/displacement
#SymbioSky

Honeybee swarms do not come together and fall apart in the same way 🐝

In this new preprint led by Danielle Chase, we report how to trick swarms to repeatedly assemble and disassemble in front of our cameras, while tracking individual bees in 3D!

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

I am excited to share our latest paper, Uniform bacterial genetic diversity along the gut, now out in Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41.... (1/n)

Tolerance toward foreigners in ants requires chronic exposure for establishment but only sporadic exposure for maintenance Bailly et al. show that ants learn to tolerate genetically distinct non-nestmates through prolonged exposure. Once established, this tolerance persists with occasional re-encounters with ants of the s...

Ants are experts at telling nestmates from foreigners via subtle differences in odor profiles. In this new paper, we explore the conditions under which ants develop and maintain tolerance to foreigners. Turns out the ant recognition system is surprisingly plastic.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Haha, that would be nice! Could be a fun way to encourage more outreach :)

While writing my PhD thesis (2020), I was told not to worry - no one besides the committee would read it. Today I learned it’s widely shared by beekeepers in WhatsApp groups in Brazil. I knew about the manual I wrote for this purpose, but not the thesis. Happy to see it being useful beyond academia!

What do milk, seminal fluid, eggs, and regurgitates have in common? Find out during our Focus Session at NWO Life 2026 “Socially Transferred Materials: Connecting Physiology, Ecology & Evolution” (28-29 May 2026, Egmond aan Zee, NL) 🐜 🐸 🐌 🐄🥚 @socialtransfernet.bsky.social

Announcing StrainVis! 🦠🧫🧪

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

This nifty web-based tool allows you to visualize your strain level analyses. You can combine ANI and synteny based analyses and it will make all kinds of cool publication ready plots for you - examples follow. By Hagay Enav and Inbal Paz:

A new preprint with Matthew Schmitt, @kiseokmicro.bsky.social and Vincenzo Vitelli makes a huge step forward in learning functional groups of components in complex biological systems. It's dimension reduction that speaks to biological function. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Long-term efficacy and safety of the single-dose tetravalent Butantan dengue vaccine
www.nature.com/articles/s41... @naturemedicine.bsky.social

Evolution 2026 meeting logo. Clilp art of a globe and laptop showing a virtual presentation. Text: Society for the Study of Evolution Global Meeting Participation.

SSE is pleased to offer free virtual #Evol2026 registration to all SSE members residing in 152 countries and territories around the world including India, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Request your free registration code today! www.evolutionsociety.org/index.php?mo...

Limited thermal tolerance in tropical insects and its genomic signature - Nature A survey of tropical insect populations and thermal tolerance limits indicates that species from lowland areas have low capacity to survive increased temperatures, and that thermal tolerance is limited by fundamental properties of protein architecture.

Nature research paper: Limited thermal tolerance in tropical insects and its genomic signature

go.nature.com/4ua5R82

Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are key to discovering and interpreting new biological functions.

We’re excited to introduce 𝑭𝒍𝒂𝒔𝒉𝑷𝑷𝑰: a new application of gLM2 that uses genomic language modeling to predict proteome-wide PPIs in microbial genomes in minutes.

Bee and flower

Stay tuned for the release of this new documentary at the end of the month! I think our buzz pollination clip might have just made the cut!

I love a good bee documentary! Honeyland is still my favorite so far, but it’s so exciting that this one is coming out! Can’t wait to see it, and hopefully catch your clip in there too.

The MicrobeAtlas database: Global trends and insights into Earth’s microbial ecosystems MicrobeAtlas (www.microbeatlas.org) is an integrated, reference-based resource for truly planet-wide microbiomics, analyzing hundreds of thousands of microbial lineages across diverse environments, co...

MicrobeAtlas is now published in Cell. 🌐🌎🦠

Explore the paper and resource to see what large-scale microbiome data reveal about global ecological patterns:
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

For a concrete application, see our recent work on “Community conservatism”:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...