🧵 New preprint out! We asked: what happens to gut bacteria when the intestine is under chronic inflammation (IBD)? Turns out, the host's inflammatory state reshapes how they evolve, and the results are pretty striking. A thread 👇
biorxiv.org
@miloj.bsky.social
This spring I took over and redesigned the only Gen Ed on plants here #IB103. We walked through every core aspect of plant bio in lectures & labs, but also through art & design. I had a blast, the evaluations are rewarding (4.9/5), the redesign got an award from the college, and a little press too!
Saying it because @kenjmloi.bsky.social didn't: This is really close to a RNA system that targets protein sequences because of wobble bases in codons. Truly amazing discovery!!
Kenneth Loi@kenjmloi.bsky.social · 4mo agoExcited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR. We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets. Thread + link below.
Thrilled to have my first PhD paper with @mmdesai.bsky.social out! @science.org Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Thread below: #mevosky #evosky #evobio #popgen #evolsky #ecoevo #molevol
Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation by purging hitchhiking load
Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms that maintain sex despite its direct costs is a long-standing challenge. Previous work has shown that sexual recombination can accelerate adaptation, in part ...
science.org
Shreyas Pai@theshreyaspai.bsky.social · last yr.Why is sex so common if it's so costly? Super excited to share our new preprint “Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation”, where we bring a new angle to this age-old evolutionary question. Co-led by Parris Humphrey, in Michael Desai's lab. Short thread here: (1/n)
🔥Preprint fresh off the press🔥 Hello Bluesky! I'm delighted to share the story I have been working on for the past 3y in @vivekmutalik.bsky.social's lab at LBNL and Adam Arkin's lab @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social. It's a wild story about 255 phages & 1,000+ HT genetic screens, are you ready? 🧵
biorxiv.org
📣Huge preprint 🔔 Today we share something our group has been working toward for a long time, led by @lucasmoriniere.bsky.social We asked can we predict which receptor a phage targets from its genome sequence alone? For most phages, we couldn’t. So Lucas set out to do something I had only dreamed of.
If you can only visit one place at Harvard, make it the glass flower exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. 4000 models, 847 species. Commissioned by the university for teaching botany and created by the Czech father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka 1887 through 1936.
Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 7mo agoGlassblowing is amazing. I had to learn it (a little) at the start of my (theoretical) physics PhD, and am so glad, even if I got a lot of burnt fingers. (The glass isn't necessarily cool when it has stopped glowing.)
How does the strength of genetic drift evolve over long times? New preprint out 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
New paper out in PNAS!!! 🎉 Do more plasmid copies mean faster evolution? 🧵 Dive into the story www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Plasmid mutation rates scale with copy number | PNAS
Plasmids are extrachromosomal DNA molecules that spread by horizontal transfer and shape bacterial evolution. Plasmids are typically present at mul...
pnas.org
Interested in eco-evolutionary feedbacks? Microbial experimental evolution? Pleiotropy? Filamentous phages?? Check out our latest preprint, now up on BioRxiv! biorxiv.org/content/10.6... For a quick summary, peep the thread below...🧵 (1/10)
biorxiv.org
Bacteria chromosomes contain Genomic Islands that provide virulence, antibiotic resistance, MGE-defence,... They transfer between cells, but the mechanism of most remains elusive. Here we explore the conjugative capacity of these mysterious Genomic Islands. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
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...
We built GenoPHI: a machine learning workflow that predicts phage-host interactions at strain level. This could help rapidly select phages to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections or for microbiome engineering without exhaustive lab testing. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Super excited that the bulk of my PhD work is now preprinted! Here we used whole-community competition, or coalescence, experiments to quantify selection acting on genetically diverged strains within larger communities. (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Excited to share pt. 2 of my blog on genotype-phenotype maps. We are now quite good at predicting protein sequence -> structure. How did this happen? Why was it possible? Can we make similar predictions for protein function, whole-cell phenotypes, or community function?
An optimistic introduction to genotype-phenotype mapping: the protein structure problem
For billions of years, life has been on a grand search through a combinatorial expanse of possibility, stretching out rootlike tendrils this way and that, fanning out at the tips into thousands of int...
open.substack.com
Dear colleagues! @davidmccandlish.bsky.social and I are serving as guest editors for the new special issue of GENETICS on fitness landscapes: doi.org/10.1093/gene... Submissions are due on March 18, 2026. Please spread the word! And reach out if you have questions.
The Fitness Landscape: A Call for Papers
Ruth Isaacson; The Fitness Landscape: A Call for Papers, Genetics, , iyaf206, https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyaf206
doi.org
I made a video about my new paper. I hope you enjoy it! vimeo.com/1113132836?s...
New paper (2025) on better understanding drug-resistance levels in different countries
I made this video about a paper that is coming out in August 2025 in the journal Epidemics. Music is from https://freetouse.com/music/ocean-bloom/summer-bliss https://freetouse.com/music/piki/a-new...
vimeo.com
Pleuni Pennings@pleunipennings.bsky.social · last yr.A new paper and video about levels of drug resistance in different countries I am so happy to share a new paper and a new video (see below). The paper describes a simple mathematical model that describes levels of drug resistance. I called the model the Resistance-Acquisition-Purifying-Selection…
The Church Evolution Laboratory (CEL@NYU) will be official as of Sep 1st: shchurch.github.io. We are recruiting at all levels, including a postdoc to work on evolutionary patterns and processes via comparative genomics in Hawaiian Drosophila. Please share widely!
Church Evolution Laboratory
Department of Biology, New York City
shchurch.github.io
Excited to share a new preprint w/ the Sonnenberg lab, led by Matt Carter, @zzzhiru.bsky.social & @mattolm.bsky.social. We analyzed the microbiomes of two non-industrialized populations from opposite sides of the globe to try to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of our gut microbiota.
Prehistoric Global Migration of Vanishing Gut Microbes With Humans
The gut microbiome is crucial for health and greatly affected by lifestyle. Many microbes common in non-industrialized populations are disappearing or extinct in industrialized populations. Understand...
biorxiv.org
I'm very excited to share something I've been working on off-and-on for a long time now: a new blog about genotype-phenotype landscapes! The first post is a Gödel-Escher-Bach-style dialogue to introduce the topic. If you like it please share/repost! open.substack.com/pub/topossib...
Great big review, and I particularly love the consistent and simple visual language in the figures!
Eduardo Rocha@epcrocha.bsky.social · last yr.Here's our new broad review on the extended mobility of plasmids, about all mechanisms driving and limiting their transfer. From conjugation to conduction, phage-plasmids to hitchers, molecular to evolutionary dynamics, ecology to biotech. The state of affairs. 1/9 academic.oup.com/nar/article/...
Published in Nature today! Here, we sought to systematically ask how natural community's metabolism changes with the environment. A simple consumer-resource model can predict N-cycle metabolism (nitrate use) and, more importantly, the mechanism behind its change. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Functional regimes define soil microbiome response to environmental change - Nature
Experimental perturbation of soil pH leads to a generalizable model of the soil microcosm comprising three functional regimes with distinct mechanisms linking environmental change to metabolite dynami...
nature.com
New Preprint!! Alejandro González-Delgado accomplished a major feat on this one: ported retron recombineering, which we love so much in E. coli, into 14 new bacterial species via a massive collaborative effort involving 9 labs! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Excited to share our study on sailing siphonophores, AKA bluebottles or man-o'-war! 🌊 we received hundreds of samples from scientists around the world, part of a huge effort to sequence genomes and test for multiple species 🧬 out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... 🦑🧪📌
Why is sex so common if it's so costly? Super excited to share our new preprint “Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation”, where we bring a new angle to this age-old evolutionary question. Co-led by Parris Humphrey, in Michael Desai's lab. Short thread here: (1/n)
bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · last yr.Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.28.646016v1
Third preprint! – We use community-function landscapes to rationally design communities for bioremediation in soils! Spoiler - it works! Led by Mahmoud Yousef, with @kiseokmicro.bsky.social, J. Tang, V. Charisopoulos, B Willett. @nitmb.bsky.social, NSF, MSTP UChicago. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Collective Microbial Effects Drive Toxin Bioremediation and Enable Rational Design
The metabolic activity of microbial communities is essential for host and environmental health, influencing processes from immune regulation to bioremediation. Given this importance, the rational desi...
biorxiv.org
Hi y'all! Know any recent or upcoming college graduates who are interested in microbiology and looking for (full-time! paid!) research experience? Please point them towards RaMP! Darian Doakes and I will be co-mentors for an MGE project that I think is going to be really cool. Apps+recs due 5/25
Bay Area RaMP
Mission The Bay Area RaMP Program in Microbiome Sciences exists to increase potential for scientific advances by expanding the microbiome research workforce with well-trained, ethical scientists. Our...
sites.google.com
🚀 New proposal from Align! The experimental platform aims to standardize #microbial #phenotyping & support predictive modeling. 🦠 Capturing data across 1k strains & 1k conditions; using BacterAI; generating high-quality datasets for ML @jensen_lab
Genotype to Phenotype: Design of an Extensible Experimental Platform for Characterizing Microbes
zenodo.org
Yo, micro/evo/qbio/physics of living systems/astrobiology/renegade cell bio folks- if you are interested in starting a feed, reply/repost this. Let's get the crew back together!
Sebastian S. Cocioba@atinygreencell.bsky.social · 2y agoWould anyone be interested in starting a microbial evolution feed on here? EvoSky is rather organismal, which is great, but would love to see experimental evo folks' feeds too. Thoughts?