Excited for the ASPET Annual Meeting next week! The Blythe Lab will be presenting three posters -- stop by to meet the team and see what we've been working on.
When we combine all known mechanisms, we still can't quantitatively account for the level of strain diversity observed in nature. This suggests a fundamental gap in our ecological understanding that requires new experimental measurements, new theoretical frameworks, and new dialogue between them.
Excited to finally share this work w/ @suryaganguli.bsky.social Tl;dr: we find the first closed-form analytical theory that replicates the outputs of the very simplest diffusion models, with median pixel wise r^2 values of 90%+. arxiv.org/abs/2412.20292
As the scientific pursuit of knowledge faces intimidating challenges, collaboration becomes even more important. I'm a staunch believer in "night-science", which works best when done with others (see this great article from Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher; doi.org/10.1038/s41587-023-02074-2).
We discuss several potential mechanisms that maintain this diversity and highlight their limitations: (1) niche-based (nutrient specialization, physiological tradeoffs, phage interactions, spatiotemporal dynamics), (2) neutral (migration, stochasticity), and (3) evolutionary (mutation, HGT).
Happy to have this out there! I had a lot of fun working with (and learning from) @akshitg.bsky.social on this mini-review on microdiversity in microbial populations and how current ecological theory fails to quantitatively explain the observations. doi.org/10.1111/1462...
