Microbiologist |microbial ecology | microbiome | phage-bacteria interactions
phages rule the world👀
Postdoc at Evolutionary Biology lab, Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine - Oeiras
Marta Lourenço
#MicroSky #phageSky
Chronic inflammation doesn't just affect you! It's actively steering the evolution of your gut microbiome. Phages and gene transfer between bacteria may play a much bigger role in IBD than we previously appreciated.
None of this would have been possible without an amazing team. Huge thank you to all co-authors & lab colleagues who contributed to this work. Shoutout to @isabelgordo.bsky.social, and also Nelson Frazão and Elsa Seixas, who started this endeavour and laid the foundation for everything you just read
Shoutout to this amazing piece of work! Do you want to know how chronic gut inflammation affects bacterial and MGEs evolution? Give this thread a read, it is fire 🔥! (ba-dum-tss)
#Microbiology research requires a stable, unified #taxonomy of bacterial strains. In this Essay, Federica Palma, @sylvainbrisse.bsky.social and co-authors discuss the LIN system, resolving communication issues for precise strain definitions and epidemiological tracking. 🧪 #AcademicSky
bit.ly/4xrMs4r
We colonized a model of IBD mice and healthy mice with two E. coli strains and tracked their evolution in real time using short- and long-read sequencing. Mutations, gene transfers, the works. Think of it as evolutionary eavesdropping on a very unhappy gut. 🦠
🧵 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 👇
Extensive transduction events lead to hybrid clones that form a new genetic lineage, establishing itself in the IBD gut. On top of that, high levels of recombination between prophages point to major impacts in viral evolution. 🦠🔬
Marta Lourenço
Inflamed guts drive unique mutations, and horizontal gene transfer becomes pervasive, at rates that could be used as diagnostic of chronic inflammation. Interestingly, the presence of a microbiota (SPF vs germ-free mice) seems to be essential for these transfer rates to occur.
Marta Lourenço
Marta Lourenço
www.biorxiv.org
I had fun writing a short commentary on the importance of integrating prophage biology into microbiome research 🦠
Now out in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social
#microbiomesky #phagesky
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
Marta Lourenço
Marta Lourenço
Marta Lourenço
Alicia Calvo-Villamañán
PLOS Biology
Marta Lourenço
Prophages are pervasive in the human gut yet largely overlooked in microbiome research,
despite substantial functional potential. Emerging evidence indicates that prophages
regulate bacterial fitness,...
