Greenfield. Greenfield Ave. If you lost your sword, some guy just found it on the sidewalk.
Becca Satterwhite
@satterwhite.bsky.social
Evolutionary microbiologist 🧪🧫🧪 Postdoc at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, co-advised by Dr. Vaughn Cooper and Dr. Kathy Shair
“You modify your surroundings, your social network, your informational diet, your daily routines, and then your modified environment modifies you, every day, whether you think about it or not.”
James McInerney@jomcinerney.bsky.social · 2w agoTake a few minutes to read. This is the next in my series about what we learn from evolutionary biology. Free to read, as always. open.substack.com/pub/profmcin...
Vaughn Cooper@vscooper.micropopbio.org · last wk.Andy Nishimoto from the Rosch lab at St. Jude led this massive project to evolve Spn in mice across 10 antibiotics and 3 immune states. Shockingly, classic resistance almost never evolved because it was too costly for fitness in the face of host immunity. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
My amazing cousin @skyeperryman.bsky.social has a book coming out — Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times — and I know it's going to be great! It's a practical guide for anyone who wants to show up for democracy and doesn't know where to start. Pre-order it here: ordinarypeopleextraordinarytimes.com
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times
How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom, and Reimagine Democracy
ordinarypeopleextraordinarytimes.com
These ideas fascinated me throughout grad school and still do
Drought Drives Resistance Noteworthy — An unrecognized link found between climate and antibiotic resistance.
Drought Drives Resistance
Noteworthy — An unrecognized link found between climate and antibiotic resistance.
smallthingsconsidered.blog
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)
What a study - nearly 15,000 people followed up 4-8 years after a *sole* antibiotic treatment and some *still* had disrupted gut microbiome diversity. Pretty incredible. We’ve always been taught that such disruptions are ephemeral. #IDSky #MicroSky
Eric Topol@erictopol.bsky.social · 5mo agoA single course of antibiotics can have lasting effects on your gut microbiome, with changes that last well beyond 4 years. Three types of antibiotics stood out for their long term disruptive impact (3 at left, Figure) nature.com/articles/s41...
We found a viral Trojan Horse: a virus can hide inside another virus.This one surprised us: deltaviruses don’t just borrow a helper virus. They can travel inside it. A literal Trojan Horse “virus-in-a-virus” route into cells. 🤯 Kudos to 1st author @viroscope.bsky.social and co-authors !
Deltaviruses spread through a viral Trojan Horse
Hepatitis D-like satellite viruses, known as deltaviruses, have been recently discovered in a wide range of animals. These viruses are thought to expr…
sciencedirect.com
🧪 This bacterial strain has been maintained in sterile water since 1994. Possible carbon sources incl. “phthalic acid - a plastic degradation product likely leached from inoculation tubes“. Genomic variations accumulated between 1994 and 2022 suggested adaptations to long-term nutrient deprivation
bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 6mo agoA 28-year evolution experiment on Burkholderia pseudomallei survival in nutrient-depleted sterile water https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.06.704356v1
My PhD work with the inimitable Joy Bergelson looking at local adaptation in a super-cool generalist pathogen that nucleates ice and decimates your favorite crop plant 🌱 👾 🧬 Thrilled to see this out (& reminded by @vscooper.micropopbio.org to celebrate each win)! link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Adaptation without Dominance in Pseudomonas syringae Pathovars - Microbial Ecology
Understanding local adaptation of phytopathogens has significant practical and economic implications. The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas syringae exemplifies this challenge, causing regular epidem...
link.springer.com
My quote of the day Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. Charles Darwin
It is widely accepted that #T6SS -mediated intoxication occurs only on solid surfaces, where prolonged cell-cell interactions are forced, and not in liquid environments. But is this generalization true? Our new preprint says it isn't. A 🧵 ... biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🦠
Aeromonas adhesins facilitate kin and non-kin attachment to enable T6SS-mediated antagonism in liquid
Bacterial ability to deploy the type VI secretion system (T6SS) against rivals requires prolonged cell-cell interactions. Such interactions are facilitated on solid surfaces but are assumed to be absent in liquid, leading to the conventional dismissal of T6SS-mediated competition in liquid environments. Here, we find that Aeromonas jandaei employs its T6SS to eliminate diverse bacterial competitors in liquid media. Using a workflow that monitors interbacterial competition via prey luminescence, we demonstrate that auto-aggregation and co-aggregation, facilitated by distinct adhesins, enable kin and non-kin recognition and intoxication in a T6SS-dependent manner. Furthermore, we show that another marine bacterium, Vibrio coralliilyticus , employs T6SS to intoxicate rivals in liquid media. Collectively, our results indicate that T6SS-mediated competition in liquid is more common in marine bacteria than previously anticipated, and can be facilitated by diverse molecular mechanisms that govern cell aggregation. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Israel Science Foundation, https://ror.org/04sazxf24, 1362/21, 2174/22 Swiss National Science Foundation, 51NF40_180541
biorxiv.org
Not exactly advice I give, but I believe this period is shaping the next gen of scientific leaders with unique skillsets. I wrote a bit about it here: uncultured.carinilab.com/p/an-open-le...
An Open Letter to Graduating PhDs in a Post-Federal Science World
July 15, 2025
uncultured.carinilab.com
Of course, why wouldn't agar also impact AMR genes too. Everything's a variable, lol. Good preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Agar concentration affects the evolution of antibiotic resistance and population genomics in experimental populations Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Bacteria live in a diversity of spatially structured environments, which can impact their evolutionary dynamics via local interactions and environmental variation. Spatial structure is expected to slo...
biorxiv.org
Marco Rubio is reportedly saying Maduro will stand trial in US courts. Which means it’s now the US administration’s position that US courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the US president, accountable for crimes.
This year I skipped the stressful holiday visit with toxic family members and opted for doing child-safe science experiments with my best friend’s young children (under 5 years old). 10/10 highly recommend! Why are we not all making baking soda ‘volcanoes’ all the time
Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad
OK, #bioinformatics folk. We have some (many many) reads from a metagenome. They have been binned into a bacterial genome. They have no matches to any known genome in any database. They code for "bacterial" genes. What are good triple-checks to do to argue that they are not, in fact, euk sequence?
I am recruiting graduate students to my genomics-focused lab in EEB at Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Please spread the word if you know any students with an interest in a computational focus to genomics research! evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldi...
https://evol.mcmaster.ca/brian/evoldir/GradStudentPositions//UIllinois.EEB.Genomics
The Catchen Lab (https://catchenlab.life.illinois.edu/), in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is recruiting graduate students to join...
evol.mcmaster.ca
Excited to share our latest paper led by Ph.D. Candidate, Owen Hale, titled Elevated rates and Biased Spectra of Mutations in Anaerobically Cultured Lactic Acid Bacteria out now in mBio! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
Elevated rates and biased spectra of mutations in anaerobically cultured lactic acid bacteria | mBio
Despite Earth’s oxygen-free origins and the abundance of microorganisms that thrive without oxygen, little is known about the rates and patterns of mutations in anaerobic species. This study directly ...
journals.asm.org
A new study provides evidence of a biological mechanism for how Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) may trigger lupus. EBV seems to reprogram B-cells at the beginning of a cascade that ultimately results in autoimmunity. The authors mention that EBV is a cause of MS, and may be related to LongCOVID.
Epstein-Barr virus reprograms autoreactive B cells as antigen-presenting cells in systemic lupus erythematosus
Epstein-Barr virus reprograms autoreactive B cells as antigen-presenting cells to promote pathogenic antinuclear T and B cell responses in lupus.
science.org
Excited to share some new work led by grad student Sophie Walton (w/ @petrovadmitri.bsky.social). We used in vitro gut communities to study how natural selection acts on strains of the same species as they compete within larger communities. Check out Sophie's thread below for details!
Sophie Jean Walton@sophiejwalton.bsky.social · 9mo agoSuper 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...
Probably the most badass thing I've ever seen! AZ Rep Yassamin Ansari has set up a table outside of Mike Johnson’s offical Speaker Of The House office with a "Mike Johnson is using the government shutdown to cover up the Epstein Files - Change My Mind" sign!! 😆
Today on Club EvMed we enjoyed a super discussion with the authors of this important paper. Join us next time or enjoy the recording! "Waning immunity drives respiratory virus evolution and reinfection" by Antia, Koelle & Bull Club EvMed: sites.duke.edu/clubevmed/ academic.oup.com/emph/article...
Waning immunity drives respiratory virus evolution and reinfection
Abstract. Viruses differ in the number and types of host tissues in which they replicate. For example, systemically replicating viruses such as measles inf
academic.oup.com
