Happy 38th birthday to the #LTEE! #BOTD in 1988. Keep on evolving! #science #evolution #microbiology

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...

Loved having a chance this weekend to showcase the science behind bioluminescence & talk about the bioluminescent bays of Puerto Rico at the Harvard Museum's Celebremos Puerto Rico 🕺🇵🇷!

The Phage DisCo method originated in the @baym.lol lab where it was primarily developed by @ellie-rand.bsky.social. The project had received support through five separate federal grants, all of which were part of the mass termination of Harvard grants three weeks ago.

🎙️New PhageLine episode out now! This week, we discuss targeted #discovery of bacteriophages by co-culture.🦠🔬 New episodes every Sunday, 12 AM CEST. 🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, any Podcatcher or here: t1p.de/phageline #PhageLine#Podcast#Bacteriophages#PhageDisCo

Phage DisCo is out in mSystems!! Super useful (and beautiful) method for targeted phage discovery for your every need :)

Ellie Rand@ellie-rand.bsky.social · 2y ago

Phage DisCo can be further multiplexed with three bacterial strains in co-culture, and, when tested with characterized phages, the fluorescent signal shined! Maybe you can see where the disco ball comparison comes in here. 🪩 4/

I'll also add: all five federal grants that supported different parts this work were part of the mass termination of Harvard grants three weeks ago

The latest work from my lab, Phage Disco, a method @ellie-rand.bsky.social developed for targeted discovery of bacteriophages based on the bacterial receptor, defense system, or other component they interact with, is now live in mSystems journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Phage DisCo: targeted discovery of bacteriophages by co-culture | mSystems

In this work, we describe a targeted phage discovery method that allows immediate isolation of phages with specific traits. Currently, to find a phage with specific properties, huge libraries of phage...

journals.asm.org

💙💙

Type VI Sophia System@wheezenfeld.bsky.social · last yr.

HUGE celebration moment, on Friday @ellie-rand.bsky.social defended her PhD!! Took a lot of determination✨ but it was awesome to see and I am so proud of the newly titled Dr Rand :)

Finally I can post my photo compilation of people accidentally twinning with figures from this paper Stacked bar chart (upside down but still) @theshreyaspai.bsky.social @baym.lol 1/3

Fernando Rossine@fernpizza.bsky.social · 2y ago

Here we show that within-cell competition is key to plasmid evolution. Look at this photo of plasmids competing inside cells in a colony!!!

My scientific career changed the day I met Fernando and my faith in science restored. In a world dominated by sequencing and LLMs, this project shows how much biology is hidden in plain sight waiting for the right person to make the connection, a must read for any scientist!

Fernando Rossine@fernpizza.bsky.social · 2y ago

I'm so happy that I can finally share the results of my first postdoc paper with @baym.lol!!! Turns out plasmids are an amazing system to study multi-scale evolution and we can track within-cell and between-cell dynamics! (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/earl...

I'm so happy that I can finally share the results of my first postdoc paper with @baym.lol!!! Turns out plasmids are an amazing system to study multi-scale evolution and we can track within-cell and between-cell dynamics! (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/earl...

Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics

Conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution, from populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements in microbes. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-r...

biorxiv.org

This is a super cool science story, but maybe also a deeper message for current events… Even though the light is much dimmer in the past few weeks, we need to survive and be ready to thrive when even a small bit returns! Channel your inner Arctic phytoplankton! 🧪

Lukas VF Novak@animalculum.bsky.social · 2y ago

How Does Life Happen When There’s Barely Any Light? www.quantamagazine.org/how-does-lif... @quantamagazine.bsky.social Photosynthetic light requirement near the theoretical minimum detected in Arctic microalgae: Clara Hoppe et al. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Protists #Algae #Diatoms #Arctic

Post the amazing science things you have done with federal funding.

This paper has been a long time coming: We looked at the genomes of historical bacterial samples over a century to look for trends of antibiotic resistance genes, finding multiple instances of them in infections before the age of antibiotics, but an increase in both frequency and mobility after

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 2y ago

Genomic resistance in historical clinical isolates increased in frequency and mobility after the age of antibiotics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.16.633422v1

50 years after its discovery, the role of the T7 kinase is finally revealed - shielding the phage against a wide variety of bacterial immune systems. Very interesting work from the Savitski & Typas labs

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 2y ago

Pervasive phosphorylation by phage T7 kinase disarms bacterial defenses https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.20.629319v1

We developed a microscopy-based technique🔬 to measure attachment of viruses #phages to host cells. 🦠 The paper was posted online today: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #phagesky #microsky

Is it “winner-takes all” when the simplest living things compete? Check out my fresh publication on phage coexistence in Science and a thread below🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Diverse phage communities are maintained stably on a clonal bacterial host

Bacteriophages are the most abundant and phylogenetically diverse biological entities on Earth, yet the ecological mechanisms that sustain this extraordinary diversity remain unclear. In this study, w...

science.org

Friends don't let friends make bad graphs repo has been updated! Friends don't let friends use boxplot for binomial (bimodal) data. Is your box plot hiding something from you? #DataVisualization github.com/cxli233/Frie...

Hey bsky! In case you missed it, we recently pushed out a preprint showcasing the Phage DisCo method for targeted phage discovery. First author @ellie-rand.bsky.social wrote an excellent tweet thread with the highlights bsky.app/profile/elli... I am very exited about this method! Here's why... 1/

Ellie Rand@ellie-rand.bsky.social · 2y ago

Get ready to dance, our paper – Phage DisCo: targeted discovery of bacteriophages by co-culture – has been pre-printed! 🪩 This has been a really fun project to work on with @sianowen.bsky.social, @baym.lol, @nquinoneso.bsky.social, and our two talented undergrads Kesther and Carmen!

Every academic right now

The first review article from my lab, helmed by @celiasouque.bsky.social, "From Petri Dishes to Patients to Populations: Scales and Evolutionary Mechanisms Driving Antibiotic Resistance" is now online and open access at Annual Reviews Microbiology: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

We've long been able to find new phages and figure out what they interact with. But what about the other direction: if you have a gene, like an antibiotic resistance efflux pump, or a phage defense system, and you want to find phages that do or do not interact with it? Now you can!

Ellie Rand@ellie-rand.bsky.social · 2y ago

What if we dug into a sample a little more “wild” and a little less characterized? We combined our strains with a wastewater sample (thank you citizens of Boston for your ~contributions~), and again we found fluorescent hits! Each was isolated and characteristics confirmed on monoculture lawns. 5/

Get ready to dance, our paper – Phage DisCo: targeted discovery of bacteriophages by co-culture – has been pre-printed! 🪩 This has been a really fun project to work on with @sianowen.bsky.social, @baym.lol, @nquinoneso.bsky.social, and our two talented undergrads Kesther and Carmen!

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 2y ago

Phage DisCo: targeted discovery of bacteriophages by co-culture https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.22.624878v1