After a truly amazing presentation on “Evolution of Plasmid Transfer Genes in Bacterial Communities”, a huge congratulations to @livkosterlitz for earning the prestigious Plasmid Biology Prize at the 2024 @PlasmidSociety meeting in Hamamatsu Japan!
How does exposure to different hosts affect evolution of bacterial genes on mobile elements? In @MolBioEvol, @livkosterlitz et al use barcode methods to compare adaptive landscapes across species & show alignment enables a form of adaptive “crowdsourcing”🧵https://t.co/oTISNGQjuZ
Horizontal gene transfer is commonplace in bacterial communities. Here we see that if landscapes align adequately, vehicles of HGT (e.g. conjugative plasmids) may enable a distributed form of genetic evolution among community members, allowing species to adaptively “crowdsource.”
🔴 New preprint 🔴 This one is the first with someone from my lab as an author! We used previously identified metabolic rules to predict microbial community assembly along a temperature gradient (1/12). https://t.co/mmQ43gJTxr
Congratulations to Dr. Sally Otto, recipient of the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award! Don't miss her award talk on Friday, June 2 at virtual #Evol2023!
https://t.co/rEV33mNiEq
@sarperotto @Evol_mtg
I have some preliminary good news, the short of it is that I will be hiring a postdoc soon to work on a collaborative project with Dr. Seunghyun Sim (an amazing chemist) to evaluate the role of spatial structure in community function using bio-printing and directed evolution.