Very excited to share our new preprint, led by Alyssa Henderson! We ask why auxotrophy is so widespread in bacteria, and find that phylogeny is the dominant predictor of autotrophy, as opposed to environmental context. Check it out! 👇
doi.org
Amino acid auxotrophy, the loss of biosynthetic potential for an amino acid, is a highly prevalent feature of microbial life, yet the evolutionary processes driving its distribution in nature remain u...
Thrilled that our paper "Eco-evolutionary dynamics of massive, parallel bacteriophage outbreaks in compost communities" is out! 🎉🦠🧬
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
w/ @paulbrainey.bsky.social, Petros Skiadas, Paulien Hogeweg, @bedutilh.bsky.social
Microbial Systems Ecology Lab
I’ve started Academic Renewal, a Substack on research culture, scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge.
The first post asks how private concerns about academic life might become an open conversation about incentives, assessment and responsibility.
academicrenewal.substack.com/p/why-academ...
Jeroen Meijer
www.science.org
A single bacteriophage can dominate microbial communities yet only evolves when migration changes its ecological context.
Belatedly sharing an opinion piece with Kuni Kaneko. We propose that 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗼𝗴𝗺𝗮 is one instance of a more general pattern that has evolved repeatedly across levels of biological organisation.
doi.org/10.1098/rstb...
Abstract. The central dogma of molecular biology, as originally proposed by Crick, asserts that information passed into protein cannot flow back out. This
doi.org
So happy to see this out 🎉 it all started with a discussion group of ECR brought together by the NCCR Microbiomes and cumulated in this primer on microbial community ecology. This was such a fun group project, where I learned a lot about how cool both microbial and human communities are 🤩
Viruses are highly abundant in the oceans, but there is one place you won't typically find them: in global ocean ecosystem models... until now.
Introducing "vDarwin", an explicit integration of viruses into the MITgcm/Darwin global ecosystem framework:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
a 🧵
Paul Rainey
New preprint! 🚨
Phage proteins don't act alone. Phages rely on homooligomerisation to assemble identical protein subunits into functional forms. But figuring out those exact configurations experimentally is tough. Learn about our approach in our new preprint! 👇 (1/n)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Evolution induced state shifts in a long-term microbial community experiment (now out, but previously posted here as a preprint) with Ville Mustonen, Lutz Becks @jcairns.bsky.social & others. Experiment continues @utu.fi and now 5+ years www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
New in Science Advances: A bacteriophage stayed genetically stable for months, then evolved rapidly in a new microbial community.
www.evolbio.mpg.de/3884217/viru...
@jeroenmeijer.bsky.social @paulbrainey.bsky.social @uni-jena.de @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social @bedutilh.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org
Pleased to see this beautiful paper out. Kudos to @jeroenmeijer.bsky.social who took @stevenquistad.bsky.social data and dug deep, revealing a new phage that erupts to astonishing abundance. As theory predicts, the life of SGEs is fuelled by encounters with new hosts
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Nobuto Takeuchi
Biological communities are complex, dynamic systems that underpin ecosystem functionality,
yet their long-term dynamics and predictability remain p...
Delighted to see this out in its final form! doi.org/10.1093/isme...
We established a discussion group focussed on the history of community ecology and how it informs our understanding of microbiota. This review distils those discussions to provide a guide for microbiologists entering the field
Abstract. Many microbiological outcomes are shaped by the determinants of community composition, including the factors that allow pathogens to invade healt
