The latent simplicity of microbial ecological interactions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.30.741683v1
Peter Laurin
@peterlaurin.bsky.social
PhD Student at UCLA studying the genetics and evolution of bacteria in the gut microbiome. peterlaurin.github.io
A few months ago, @elena-romero.bsky.social published a paper showing that HIV escape from broadly neutralizing antibody 10-1074 is driven by very recurrent mutation. In her latest, she asks - just how soft are the signatures of these sweeps? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Haplotype and diversity signatures of ultra-soft selective sweeps in HIV-1
Many urgent medical and agricultural challenges are driven by resistance evolution via soft selective sweeps of multiple simultaneous mutations. Standard approaches to detect these mutations involve g...
biorxiv.org
Dear microbiome enthusiasts: I'm excited to be moving my lab to New York University this fall (& the NYU Institute for Engineering Health); with joint-appointment @isbscience.org I'm hiring a postdoc @ NYU to look at diet-driven evolution in the gut: apply.interfolio.com/189980 Please share! 🦠🤓
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
apply.interfolio.com
Interested in joining a growing lab in LA? We’re hiring a postdoc!! Please spread the word to folks in your network and feel free to get in touch with any questions recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF11142
Super excited to share new work with my advisor @nanditagarud.bsky.social! We re-examine the rapidity of adaptation in the human gut microbiome and begin to characterize the adaptive architecture of selective sweeps spreading across human guts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10... 1/n:
Complex adaptive architectures constrain the pace of adaptations sweeping across human gut microbiomes
Recent work has shown that commensal gut bacteria can evolve rapidly within hosts on short timescales of days to months, fueled by the enormous mutational input generated daily in the microbiome. Yet ...
biorxiv.org
We're excited to share our work on how prophages influence the evolution of resistance against DNA-damaging antibiotics! This has been a fun project with @sianowen.bsky.social, @baym.lol, @theshreyaspai.bsky.social, @kepatitis-c.bsky.social, & @fernpizza.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/
SOS-mediated prophage induction constrains resistance evolution to DNA-damaging antibiotics
Most naturally occurring bacteria are lysogens, encoding one or more temperate phages (prophages) integrated into their genome. As prophages are induced by the bacterial SOS response, DNA-damaging ant...
biorxiv.org
Spent the last two years developing a new Intro to Physics course for undergrad biology majors. It features tons of examples from biology (especially Ecology & Evolution!) and requires only middle school-level math. Lecture note here shorturl.at/0PiVp Any comments or feedback are highly welcome!
physics_for_biologists.pdf
drive.google.com
New preprint from the last portion of my PhD! Despite low masked load, we found evidence for strong inbreeding depression in Devils Hole pupfish. The reason? A recessive lethal haplotype that causes a heart defect among developing embryos. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Long-term small effective population size, inbreeding, and a recessive lethal haplotype drive premature death in the endangered Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis)
As anthropogenic habitat fragmentation and population decline accelerate globally, growing numbers of species face compounding demographic and genetic threats to long-term survival. Many populations a...
biorxiv.org
Our latest preprint, led by PhD student Jacob Cavon, is online: "Multivariate determinants of wearable-measured sleep quality across a large observational cohort: roles of physical activity, gut microbiome, blood analytes, and lifestyle factors." 🦠😴🏃⚕️ www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵...
Multivariate determinants of wearable-measured sleep quality across a large observational cohort: roles of physical activity, gut microbiome, blood analytes, and lifestyle factors.
Emerging evidence links the gut microbiome to sleep quality, yet measuring sleep at scale remains challenging. Commercial wearables, such as Fitbit, capture objective sleep and activity data in natura...
medrxiv.org
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?
Scoop: There has been a massive shakeup at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Eight of the top ten officials have now been pushed out since President Donald Trump took office. In @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Exclusive: NIH ousts infectious-disease leaders as COVID scientists face US charges
Eight of the top ten officials at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have now been pushed out since President Donald Trump took office.
nature.com
📣 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 📧
1/23 New preprint! Been thinking about the origin of cellular life. Specifically, how protocells (or *any* compartments) just aren't enough to support the evolution of increasingly complex cells. You gotta de-Darwinize the parts! The ribosome/genome do this. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Our paper entitled "The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid admixture in ancient Eurasians" is now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1.... A really fun and informative collaboration with @mharris.bsky.social, Ziyi Mo and Adam Siepel. (1/n)
The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid admixture in ancient Eurasians | PNAS
The extent to which human adaptations have persisted throughout history despite strong eroding demographic events such as admixture, genetic drift,...
pnas.org
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
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)
Transposable elements are driving rapid adaptation of Enterococcus faecium -in @nature.com from Ami Bhatt www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Transposable elements are driving rapid adaptation of Enterococcus faecium - Nature
Over three decades, rapid expansion of the transposable element ISL3 has reshaped Enterococcus faecium, which helps to explain this pathogen’s growing clinical threat.
nature.com
We've known the gut-brain axis is a key underpinning of Parkinson's disease. Today, for the 1st time, a gut microbiome signature denoting risk found in healthy individuals with genetic predisposition nature.com/articles/s41...
Microbiome signature of Parkinson’s disease in healthy and genetically at-risk individuals - Nature Medicine
Microbiome analysis suggests that gut microbial changes in Parkinson’s disease evolve progressively from healthy individuals to genetically at-risk individuals to clinically affected patients, with th...
nature.com
1/25 New paper out in PNAS! We show that the fitness costs of reproductive specialization, where somatic cells give up reproduction, scale inversely with organism size. Larger organisms can afford far more soma, removing a key barrier to multicellular complexity.
The fitness costs of reproductive specialization scale inversely with organismal size
pnas.org
New preprint! We sequenced 175 'Alalā (Hawaiian crow) genomes to understand why >50% of eggs fail to hatch in a species recovered from just 9 individuals. What we found was a both exciting and surprising. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Prediction markets aren't just corrupt. They are a sign of our nation's spiritual atrophy - as every moral question became commodified and wagering becomes a growing source of meaning and purpose. My latest substack:
Prediction Markets Are the Latest Sign of Our Spiritual Disintegration
As I write this, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of bets have been placed on Polymarket, the massive prediction marketplace, regarding how many people will die in the Iran War over the next sev...
chrismurphyct.com
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)
Really excited that this major work from my PhD is finally published in @plosbiology.org ! In it, we were trying to tackle a fundamental question in evolution - how do genetic mutations map onto evolutionary fitness? (1/n) journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
Genotype-fitness mapping of adaptive mutants reveals shifting low-dimensional structure across divergent environments
Predicting the effect of a genetic mutation on fitness is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. This study uses fitness effects of a large collection of adaptive yeast mutants in multiple lab env...
journals.plos.org
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
NEE Focus issue on "Evolution in medicine", including a comment article from @alisonfeder.bsky.social and me.
Context dependency is essential for predicting intrahost evolution - Nature Ecology & Evolution
The ability to predict rapid evolutionary processes within our bodies would advance both medical science and evolutionary biology. We discuss technologies that move us towards intrahost evolutionary p...
nature.com
Our March issue is a Focus on "Evolution in medicine", out now! www.nature.com/natecolevol/... Including research & opinion on: ➡️Somatic evolution and health ➡️Predicting intrahost evolution ➡️Collateral sensitivity during antibiotic therapy Cover illustration by Alex Cagan @atjcagan.bsky.social
Capturing dynamic phage–pathogen coevolution by clinical surveillance @nature.com @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The Goldberg lab at UCLA is hiring one or more postdocs. Flexible start date. We develop methods to study population genetics of humans, our primate relatives, and our pathogens. www.goldberglab.org/join
Amy Goldberg, PhD - Join
The Goldberg lab is moving to UCLA summer 2025, and recruiting postdocs and graduate students. We are a computational lab with occasional wet lab or field collaborators. We will be located in the Depa...
goldberglab.org
Parallel evolution of industrial melanism in the peppered moth: one locus, many alleles https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.26.707722v1