Sarahi explains their work on microbial diversity in enrichment pure cultures - the value of community-based cultivation to discover different ecological strategies, autotrophy for amino acids and vitamins See their work in @commsbio.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s42... #MibiNet

Microbial model communities exhibit widespread metabolic interdependencies - Communications Biology

Microbial model communities bridge the gap between pure culture and environmental studies, revealing widespread metabolic interdependencies that shape how natural microbial groups thrive and interact ...

nature.com

1/17 Submissions are now open for the 2027 Microbial Population Biology GRC! We expect this meeting to be extraordinarily oversubscribed. If you want to come, time is of the essence--apply ASAP! June 27–July 2 • Andover, NH www.grc.org/microbial-po...

#Adaptation is assumed to proceed by survival of the fittest. The study shows that #mutation bias can drive adaptation via survival of the likeliest, steering bacteria along divergent paths to resistance with major consequences for control strategies. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mutation-biased adaptation is consequential even in large bacterial populations - Nature Communications

Adaptation is assumed to proceed by survival of the fittest. The study shows that mutation bias can drive adaptation via survival of the likeliest, steering bacteria along divergent paths to resistanc...

nature.com

New paper from myself and Alejandro Couce out now in Nature Communications! We wanted to test the idea that mutation biased adaptation - aka arrival bias / arrival of the fittest - is only of importance in small population sizes... www.nature.com/articles/s41... (thread below)

Out Now! Purine bias in bacterial genes is driven by runaway transcription #MicroSky

Purine bias in bacterial genes is driven by runaway transcription

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 15 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02389-1Purine bias is critical for gene expression in bacteria, preventing premature transcription in species that exhibit runaway transcription.

go.nature.com

This has finally been published in Nature Communications! Please check it out if you are interested in population genetics, antibiotic resistance and mutation biased adaptation :) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Jake Barber@jakenbarber.bsky.social · last yr.

New pre-print is finally out! This is the first project from my postdoc with Alejandro Couce, looking at how mutation-bias influences adaptation across large population sizes, and how this may have real world consequences. Really happy with how this turned out :) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our work characterizing how mutational bias is influenced by the local sequence context beyond trinucleotides is out now @pnas.org! We also showed which motifs are most prone to mutations caused by strand misalignment, revealing several new hotspots! 🧬 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our study comparing promoter existence and emergence in random vs genomic DNA is finally published!!! TLDR: the E. coli genome has more promoters than random DNA (even in intergenic regions), and promoters emerge ~3x more readily from random DNA than genomic DNA. (1/2)

De novo promoters emerge more readily from random DNA than from genomic DNA

Promoters emerge three times more readily from random DNA than from genomic DNA.

science.org

Having just finished my MCSA Fellowship with him, I would really encourage those looking to do a postdoc in microbial adaptation to check out Alex Couces lab in Madrid. Alex is a gifted researcher, and Madrid is a wonderful city to live in :) Details in link below: evoldir.net/brian/evoldi...

Check our new paper which I had the privilege to write with @kostchristian.bsky.social published in PNAS!

Christian Kost@kostchristian.bsky.social · 6mo ago

@shrylishreekar.bsky.social and me wrote a commentary on Chunhui Hao's and @stuwest.bsky.social et al.'s recent paper "Cooperation and the evolution of bacterial niche breadth" in PNAS. Please find our commentary here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Storme De Scally et al describe how genomic and biological characterisation of bacteriophages help us better understand bacteria-phage ecological and evolutionary dynamics in natural and synthetic communities. @mikejmcd.bsky.social @jeremyjbarr.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Spatial structure: Shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities @femsjournals.bsky.social Microbiology Review by @marcelbaecker.bsky.social et al from @bedutilh.bsky.social @bramvandijk.bsky.social academic.oup.com/femsre/advan...

Spatial structure: Shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities

Abstract. Most microbes grow in spatially structured communities, and this profoundly shapes their ecology and evolution. At the microscale, short interact

academic.oup.com

New paper by Saskia Wilmsen and me just came out BioEssays: A new classification framework to understand evolutionary transitions in individuality Please find the OA paper here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

A New Classification Framework to Understand Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality

Classifying biological entities based on whether and how the two fundamental aspects physiological and evolutionary components are represented yields six types of structural organization. The resulti...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

You have heard of the gut microbiome but what do we know about plant microbiomes? Christopher Blake & colleagues examined the bacteria in the rhizosphere of Canola and suggest scope for better design interventions that support sustainable crop production. doi.org/10.1016/j.bc...

Fresh news on de novo genes! Happy to present our latest work published in Nature communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Keywords not in specific order: intergenic ORFs, de novo genes, GC content, foldability, genetic code, ancestral sequence reconstruction and more :)

New preprint from our lab www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...! Andrea Dos Santos and Clément Vulin combine experiments and models showing how adding glucose can strengthen negative interactions between microbial species. This can be used in tandem with antibiotic treatment to inhibit pathogens!

Very cool paper by Jyotsna Kalathera et al. from @iamsamayp.bsky.social 's-lab on Bottleneck size drives the evolution of cooperative traits in an aggregative multicellular myxobacterium just out @plosbiology.org Congratulations to all coauthors. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Bottleneck size drives the evolution of cooperative traits in an aggregative multicellular myxobacterium

Population bottlenecks shape the evolution of cooperative traits in Myxococcus xanthus through life cycle trade-offs. This study shows that stringent bottlenecks favor growth and sporulation, while re...

journals.plos.org

New preprint from my lab (with Arya Kaul, @fernpizza.bsky.social, and @brinda.eu), in which we explore new genes hitchhiking on the beneficial deletion that fused them together, and find them in the LTEE, M. Tb/bovis, and across the bacterial tree of life

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Novel genes arise from genomic deletions across the bacterial tree of life https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.05.697752v1

As we close the year, the ISME Early Career Scientist Committee is glad to spotlight @duhitasant.bsky.social , Postdoctoral Researcher at Rutgers University, and her paper “Eco-evolutionary robustness of wild bacterial communities to experimental perturbation”. doi.org/10.1093/isme... (1/2)

This is totally worth 5 minutes of your time and probably should be in every biology class. Nature is awesome. neal.fun/size-of-life/

Size of Life

From an amoeba to a blue whale

neal.fun

Hey, fellow evolutionary biologists: If you support trans rights, like, comment, or repost this. I want to show that transphobes like Richard Dawkins are a loud minority that does not represent our community

Jade Fortunato@jadedfortunato.bsky.social · 10mo ago

And that’s a follow. Actually I do have a question if you have a sec. Without exception the most transphobic group of scientists I’ve run into online are evolutionary biologists. Every single one of them has expressed the same opinion: transness cannot be anything other than social contagion. Why?

"The changing roles of Escherichia coli" -- a short essay by yours truly. rdcu.be/eVtXT

The changing roles of Escherichia coli

Nature Microbiology - Richard Lenski traces the legacy of Escherichia coli and how science is evolving to use this model organism in new ways.

rdcu.be

Hyphal growth determines spatial organization and coexistence in a pathogenic polymicrobial community in a spatially structured environment #ISMEJournal by @mlaenoc.bsky.social et al academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

Hyphal growth determines spatial organization and coexistence in a pathogenic polymicrobial community in a spatially structured environment

Abstract. The bodies of macroorganisms host microbes living in multi-species communities. Sequencing approaches have revealed that different organs host di

academic.oup.com

How do bacteria deal with double costs? And how costly are unusual levels of mistranslation anyway? In short - antibiotics are more of an issue than less/more mistranslation, but the latter changes how populations deal with antibiotics. For the long story, check out our new paper!

Laasya Samhita@laasya2.bsky.social · 10mo ago

So happy that this work simultaneously measuring the costs of antibiotic exposure and mistranslation is finally out in MBE! Work from @deepaagashe.bsky.social (who was ultra patient!) and my labs. Do see the research highlight here, with Nishant's lovely graphic. academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Nature Reviews Genetics Focus issue: Eco-evolutionary genomics of microorganisms www.nature.com/collections/... 🧬🖥️🧪🦠 🧵 1/

🗞️ New preprint from the lab, led by our postdoc Ana Garoña (not on here) in collab with @andreagiometto.bsky.social: “Experimental evolution of cellular miniaturization reveals a mechanism for cell size evolution”, aka: “honey, we shrank the yeasts!” 🎥 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Impact of fluctuating environments on the fitness and robustness of evolving laboratory and industrial Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.05.692621v1

Strong genotype-by-genotype and genotype-by-environment interactions induced by antibiotic resistance mutations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.03.692229v1

Competition between Pseudomonas species constrains ecological diversification in polymicrobial biofilms NPJ Biofilms and Microbiomes from Henriette Lyng Røder and @vscooper.micropopbio.org www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our new collaborative work led by @taliamycota.bsky.social Jiajun Cui & Emma Caullireau between my lab @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @cloeucl.bsky.social & the Karasov Lab (tkarasovlab.org) @uofubiology.bsky.social and collaborators: @plantricia.bsky.social et al. tinyurl.com/5yx2wmz5 (1/n)