Peter Laurin

@peterlaurin.bsky.social

PhD Student at UCLA studying the genetics and evolution of bacteria in the gut microbiome. peterlaurin.github.io

First real post on the new blog! If you follow human genetics, you've likely of "missing heritability". If you look at twins to estimate heritability, you get values much larger than what molecular genomic methods produce. IQ, for example, goes from 50-80% heritability to 10-15%. Which is right?

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📣 Our lab is recruiting postdocs to lead new fully funded projects on mechanisms of microbiome–gut–brain signaling & microbial regulation of brain–body interactions in disease, w supportive clinical collaborators. Expertise in gut–brain, systems neuro, or neuroimmunology preferred. Please email 📧

The last chapter of my PhD is finally out !!!! In the same species, on neighboring islands, we see radically different warning colors emerge. Evolution in action: Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol...

Selection-driven color variation in the aposematic strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio

Aguilar-Gómez et al. use exome sequencing of 347 strawberry poison frogs to uncover the genetic basis of color variation. They identify that kit, ttc39b, and bco1 underlie blue-red, yellow-red, and gr...

cell.com

In the lab, antibiotics can make integrated viruses (prophages) pop out of bacterial genomes. In this (short!) preprint, we asked a simple question: how much does this happen outside the lab, in the human gut? TLDR: Not much overall, in specific bacterial species. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Species-specific prophage induction by ciprofloxacin in human gut metagenomes

Antibiotics are known to trigger prophage induction in controlled laboratory settings, but it remains unclear whether this also occurs within microbiomes in nature. Current methods investigating the link between antibiotics and prophage induction within the human gut rely on in vitro culturing of human gut bacterial isolates. Using a metagenomic approach, we aimed to measure prophage induction and whether it is associated with antibiotic exposure. Across two independent human cohorts, we compared prophage to bacterial host read depth ratios (P:H) across known or measured antibiotic exposures. We found that induction is not broadly associated with antibiotic exposures at the level of the overall microbiome, but that ciprofloxacin increases P:H ratios in specific bacterial species. We documented heterogeneous trajectories of P:H ratios over the course of antibiotic exposure, sometimes increasing and remaining high, or returning to baseline. This study complements experimental models by providing in vivo evidence of induction in the human gut. Importance Bacteriophages are viruses that infect a bacterial host. The lytic and lysogenic cycles are the two classic outcomes of phage infection. In the lytic cycle, the phage immediately replicates and lyses its host to release new viral particles. In the lysogenic cycle, the phage, now called a prophage, integrates its genome into that of its host without killing it. Prophages can switch to the lytic cycle in a process called induction, in which the viral genome is replicated, the host cell is lysed, and viral particles are released. The most immediate consequence of induction is host cell death which can impact bacterial populations and communities. Since prophages are mobile genetic elements that can move between bacteria, they are also an important vehicle for horizontal gene transfer. While induction has been well studied in vitro , whether and how induction occurs within the complex microbial ecosystem in humans is less well characterized. Understanding prophage induction in vivo is therefore critical in corroborating in vitro observations. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. NIH Common Fund, https://ror.org/001d55x84 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council

biorxiv.org