"The changing roles of Escherichia coli" -- a short essay by yours truly. rdcu.be/eVtXT

Come study with me! philosomama.blogspot.com/2025/12/phd-...

📢 I'm hiring! 3-year postdoc in theoretical evolutionary ecology at University of Helsinki 🇫🇮 Apply: jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki-Postdoctoral-Researcher-in-Theoretical-Evolutionary-Biology/1348955157/ #AcademicJobs #Postdoc #EvolutionaryEcology #TheoreticalEcology #ScienceJobs #AcademicChatter

A free, open-access library of high-quality organism illustrations for science communication

A new, long paper on evolution - natural induction - split into 2: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article... royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article... @RichardWatson90 and Tim Lewens

We're looking for a new colleague at Asssoc Prof level! Come join us in the Zoology Department at Stockholm University. A teaching profile in ecology, faunistics and/or physiology is beneficial. Find the full job advertisemnt here: su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

#OnThisDay in 2001, at the age of 57, the German writer W. G. Sebald died while driving his car. In a special post we feature the many public domain books of which, and through which, Sebald speaks in his masterpiece The Rings of Saturn (1995) — publicdomainreview.org/collection/t... #otd

📢 The Call for Abstracts for #EMPSEB31 is now open! 🔗 Full details & submission info on our website. ✈️ Applying for an ESEB Travel Grant? ⏰ Abstract deadline for travel-grant applicants: January 15, 2026 ⏳ General abstract deadline: February 1, 2026 #EvoBio #PhD #EMPSEB31

Inspired in this iconic Guarda course, a group of four Latin American researchers organized the South American version: #EvoSur. The masterminds behind this amazing idea: Paco Majic (Uruguay) @hhydrochaerus.bsky.social, Santi Herrera (Colombia), Caua Westmann (Brasil) and Ana Maria Agapito (Perú).

Conjugative plasmids help spread AMR genes. @andrewmatthews.bsky.social @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social & @tatianadimitriu.bsky.social show that #AMR loss in evolving populations involves streamlined #plasmids that gain a transmission advantage by deleting AMR genes @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/48NM0BL

*SAVE THE DATE* On Tuesday December 16 at 11am Eastern we will have virtual book launch of The Paradox of the Organism. It will be hosted by the great @athenaaktipis.bsky.social. Please join! Zoom link here: internalconflictsstn.wordpress.com/seminars/

🧬✨ It’s official! EMPSEB31 is coming to Germany, June 2026! Link in Bio 😉 Europe’s friendliest evolution meeting returns, by PhD students, for PhD students. 📍Oberwiesenthal, Germany 📅8–12 June 2026 🚨Save the date & follow us for updates! #EMPSEB31 #EvoBio #PhDLife #ScienceCommunity #EMPSEB

The 2026 Guarda Summer Course in Evolutionary Biology is now accepting applications. Amazing place, amazing course, amazing opportunity for early grad students. tb.ethz.ch/education/gu...

1/28 New preprint up, which I think is the best theoretical idea I've ever had. We asked a simple question: what are the costs of investment into non-reproductive somatic cells? Turns out these costs decrease with the *logarithm* of organism size! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

My first lead author paper is out with Ben Kerr and @alisonfeder.bsky.social! We found that making an antiviral too strong can sometimes make resistance easier to evolve. This has implications for how we design drugs, choose doses, and think about viral evolution in the face of treatment. (1/n)

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Amazing dataset describing the metabolic profiles of 66 E. coli transporter knockouts by @sulheim.bsky.social with Peter Doubleday and @nzamboni.bsky.social. The tool, set up by @lambdapp.bsky.social and Eric Ulrich allows you to explore for yourself. Enjoy! Pre-print here: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

New preprint from our lab www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...! Andrea Dos Santos and Clément Vulin combine experiments and models showing how adding glucose can strengthen negative interactions between microbial species. This can be used in tandem with antibiotic treatment to inhibit pathogens!

En junio me lancé a Oaxaca para investigar el pasado y la vida cotidiana de una cícada que hoy crece en el Jardín Etnobotánico de esa ciudad. Fue una experiencia retebonita que me permitió escribir este "Perfil Silvestre" para mi muy querida RUM. www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/articles/279...

Great opportunity for those interested in fundamental questions in evolutionary biology and mathematical models: postdoc opening in Laurent Lehmann’s group @unil.bsky.social. We have a lively community of theorists here in Lausanne with good interactions across groups. Join us ! Please RP

🧬🛡️How are new immune mechanisms created? We show how Lamassu antiphage system, originated from a DNA-repair complex and evolved into a compact and modular immune machine, wt Dinshaw Patel lab in @pnas.org. 👏 @matthieu-haudiquet.bsky.social, Arpita Chakravarti & all authors! doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

i will be giving a talk on some recently published work on the 4th of December. Come by (zoom link below) if you want to think and learn about the evolution of mutual dependence and synchronised reproduction in endosymbioses!

New preprint! Ever wondered why only a fraction of genomes encode CRISPR immunity? 🧬 🦠 Turns out CRISPR is rarely beneficial against virulent phages, being most beneficial against those for which resistance mutations are rare! An epic effort by Rosanna Wright www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What is the best strategy to win any contest? Eliminate your opponents of course. Recently, my friend @fernpizza.bsky.social showed how plasmids compete intracellularly (check out his paper published in Science today!). With @baym.lol, we now know they can fight. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very happy to see this piece out in @plosbiology.org, on the bacterial immune systems and microbial communities. It was a great team effort with Rafael Custodio, @brockhurstlab.bsky.social , @brownlab.bsky.social, and Edze Westra! 🦠🧫 #phagesky #mevosky journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Population genetics simulations and analysis of experimental datasets in yeast, Drosophila and E. coli show that beneficial mutations are abundant but transient, as they become deleterious after environmental turnover (antagonistic pleiotropy)🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

PhD studentship opportunity! Join us at St Andrews to study the factors controlling plasmid transmission in the gut. Competition-funded as part of the EASTBIO DTP, co-supervised with Dr Jaclyn Pearson. Please share & pass on to anyone interested! 🦠🧫 Deadline 15th December👇

🚨#PhD studentship opportunity! Plasmids provide bacteria with antimicrobial resistance, but do they have more fundamental effects on behaviour? 🧫🦠💫🧟‍♂️ Apply for a 4y funded MRC DiMeN position with me and Jamie Wheeler @livuni-ives.bsky.social www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Modestly, we decided to review a century's worth of theories of balancing selection :) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

When colonizing a new habitat, organisms adapt to maximize their reproductive success via #LifeHistory #evolution. @ecoevodevolab.bsky.social @cbank.bsky.social show that life history evolution facilitates niche diversification across a range of theoretical models @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4p7YT0a

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

One of the most exciting works of my career, years in the making. We used high-throughput precision genome editing to test the fitness effects of thousands of natural variants. Our findings challenge the long-held assumption that common variants are inconsequential. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Super 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...

"I've been in 160 films, and I feel I'm nearing the end, but of all of the films I have been in, Harakiri, taken as a whole, is my favourite of them all." Tatsuya Nakadai, the immortal.

Thinking about your first steps to independent research? We'd love to hear from you. More details below, or contact me directly for details - reposts appreciated! www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Open position at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics: We are looking for a Director of the Center of Pathogen Bioinformatics apply.refline.ch/499599/0346/... I am in the Center's steering board together with fantastic colleagues (Emma Hodcroft @firefoxx66.bsky.social, Richard Neher @neher.io, and

🐝🦠 New paper: rdcu.be/eOf7A Phages may drive microbial diversity, yet we often don’t even know how phages & bacteria correlate in nature. Our new study tackles this in the honeybee gut, thanks to the great work of PhD student @malickndiaye.bsky.social at @dmf-unil.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social

*NEW PAPER* How much of a threat are within-organism conflicts, really? In Biology & Philosophy, @martijnschenkel.bsky.social, Manus Patten, and I present a mathematical framework to measure evolutionary individuality in the face of internal conflicts. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I am excited to announce two PhD opportunities! Come and join our interdisciplinary team in Sheffield, UK. - Destroying forever chemicals with microbes and cold plasma: tinyurl.com/mth8ymx5 - Learning how motile bacteria make decisions: tinyurl.com/2hmc9a8u UK and overseas students welcome to apply!

We have an open PhD position (application deadline 9 January 2026) in "Theory of fitness landscapes" at @unibe.ch 🤓⛰️📊👩‍💻🎓: banklab.github.io/positions/ Please share widely! #QueerInSTEM #DisabledInSTEM #BlackInSTEM #WomenInSTEM #CarersInSTEM #AcademicSky #HigherED

@prczhaoyansong.bsky.social’s deep dive into the dark matter of compost communities is now out 🎉 Genomic islands hijack jumbo phages—whose capsids enable transfer of large tracts of DNA—shedding new light on the scale & scope of phage-mediated gene flow 😎 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#microsky #mevosky @spp2389.bsky.social A PhD position is available in my lab to work on: Emergence and self-organisation of bacterial metabolism in consortia of cross-feeding bacteria. Please RT Deadline: 12.11.25 More infos 👇 shorturl.at/rAKAT

(1/9) Join us in Bern, Switzerland (8–11 Feb 2026) for our EMBO Workshop on Molecular Mechanisms of Selfish Elements and Strategies! Organized with Tanja Schwander, Laura Ross (@laurarossevo.bsky.social) and Axel Imhof. meetings.embo.org/event/26-sel... #EMBOselfishElements #EMBOevents

New pre-print: Plasmid dependent phage effectively eliminate AMR bacteria and block plasmid transmission in the chicken gut microbiome Fun collaboration with Tao He lab (JAAS) and @brockhurstlab.bsky.social lab (Manchester) #phagesky#microsky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Applications for the MEME programme (www.evobio.eu ) are now open! MEME is a research- and mobility-oriented master’s in evolutionary biology (& I’m a proud alumna!), jointly run by the Unis of Groningen, Uppsala, Montpellier, and LMU Munich, with Harvard and Lausanne as partners. Spread the word!

New paper with my (amazing) friend and mentor @jrpenades.bsky.social Really looking forward to see what plasmid aficionados think of this one!! With @asantoslopez.bsky.social @wfigueroac3.bsky.social Akshay Sabins and others www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Interested in resource competition theory, mutualism, spatial patterns or temporal dynamics? I'll be giving a talk in the IITE online seminar series tomorrow summarizing our recent work on microbial cross-feeding that includes all these ingredients.

Next week, we welcome @cmarin.bsky.social in our ROTO Lecture Series. César will speak about understanding plant holobionts through complexity science. 🌿 Just register here to participate 👉 rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #HPBio #PhilSci #PlantScience

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #phagesky #phage defence #synbio #microsky