🚨 New preprint from the lab! 🚨 We show that multireplicon plasmids are true AMR "jack-of-all-trades": Widespread, highly mobile, broad host-range, and packed with resistance genes. Far from random, they form co-evolving associations driven & 𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 by IS elements. See Nacho's thread below!👇👇

The first preprint on chemostats from our lab! What a ride it's been with Eric Ulrich doi.org/10.64898/202... Congratulations on what was a challenging project that taught us so much about cross-feeding, chemostat theory and how minimal media are impossible to keep minimal ;) Enjoy the read!

Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR. We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets. Thread + link below.

"Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are." It turns out, microbes follow the same rule! Very proud to share our lab's new paper in @natmicrobiol.nature.com showing that bacteria don't just respond to their environment, they respond to each other. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Big opportunities for researchers 🌍 We are investing nearly €400 million to help researchers share their work and collaborate with the best scientific teams across the EU. The 2026 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships are now open. More: link.europa.eu/PNxpxw

Happy to finally share these results: Cross-feeding enables robust coexistence between four bacterial species www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... With @saramitri.bsky.social @lambdapp.bsky.social @dan1elmachado.bsky.social @lhtxra.bsky.social Eric Ulrich, Alisson Gillon & Sam Testa #microsky

Applications now open for the UNIL Summer School on Modelling for Evolutionary Biology (31 Aug–5 Sep 2026, Lausanne)! For PhD & postdocs interested in formal approaches to evolutionary ecology (incl. social evo, life-history, species interactions). Scholarships available, Pls RP! shorturl.at/fo1GA

I’m glad to share my new book on organisms, biology and Kant: When Metaphysics meets Biology. Kantian approaches to Concept of Organism. (Routledge) The book is open access so you can download the pdf, read, share #philsci #evobio #philbio #histbio #kant www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mon...

Interested in predicting the dynamics of antibiotic resistance? Come work with us! We're looking for two postdocs to develop predictive models of resistance. We're interested in a range of approaches (mathematical & statistical modelling, causal inference, machine learning). tinyurl.com/6c4y3jke

Fascinating short history, including how "Isaac Newton’s famous Waste Book is a rare example of a physical continuity between the two cultures of notetaking: humanist and scientific." www.asimov.press/p/lab-notebo...

Check out our newest preprint! 📝 We find that adaptation on coevolutionary fitness landscapes is highly repeatable, but landscape-specific, and intergenomic epistasis creates coevolutionary fitness load for interacting species due to frequent fitness trade-offs 🏋️

Please remember that the International Symposium on Plasmid Biology (ISPB 2026) will take place 7–11 September 2026 in Berlin, Germany! A great opportunity to meet, reconnect, and engage with the global plasmid biology community. 🤝 plasmid-biology-2026.de

How diverse is bacterial immunity ? We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems. 👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie... Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

Our institute @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social starting a new Masters program with the University of Leipzig. If you are a bachelors student graduating soon, and would like to get involved with our research during you MSc, consider applying :) www.uni-leipzig.de/en/studying/...

Finally! Here is our perspective on why cooperation maximizes diversity and how it promotes additional coexistence mechanisms that do not occur under competition journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1... This is a hard topic with strong opinions... Thanks @asn-amnat.bsky.social for publishing it! 🧵👇

This paper started as an idea @albertomarina.bsky.social had many years ago… which of course means he was right all along 😄. Some of us just needed a few years (and a lot of experiments) to catch up. Grateful (and slightly humbled) to be part of this. Thanks Alberto! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Applications for our international Master‘s programme in Evolutionary Biology open again soon! We offer teaching and exciting research in molecular and experimental evolution, behaviour, ecology to genomics, bioinformatics and modelling. Come join us at JGU Mainz!

How common is multicellularity in bacteria? And archaea? And how does it evolve? We wrote a short review "On the architecture and evolution of prokaryotic multicellularity". Preprint link: bit.ly/4ta06Gq Sharing and comments are much appreciated. 1/4

Join us in Chicago in June!

MEEHubs2026 registration and abstract submission is now online! 🚨🦠✨ Join us Aug 3 - 5, 2026 at one of the 7 hubs or online. We are incredibly excited about our lineup of speakers, and hope that you submit an abstract to contribute too! More information and registration links at: meehubs.org

🚨 Next Friday 20/03 15:30 EU, Julia Schwartzman (University of Southern California) will present the talk Ecological Dynamics of Bacterial Groups at the Population Dynamics Seminars. Subscription sites.google.com/view/popdyn/

🚨 PhD position available ! 🚨 I am hiring a PhD student to work with me on the evolution of plant sexual systems 🌺 at @unifrbiology.bsky.social ! The position is funded for 4 years by @snsf.ch as part of my Ambizione fellowship. More info here: tinyurl.com/monoecy 🌱 Please RP and share widely ! 🌱

Final version of our last paper is out! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For the second preprint, we collaborated with Travis Wiles to understand microbiome transmission and its role in community assembly using zebrafish. We found that dispersal dynamics can readily move gut colonization and assembly from a stochastic to fairly predictable www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New preprint on the limits of detecting higher-order interactions in microbial communities. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We find that the dominance of additive and pairwise interactions on community function may not reflect biological simplicity, but fundamental limits of statistical detection.

With @saramitri.bsky.social, @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social and L. Lehmann we’ve launched the UNIL Center for Theory in Ecology and Evolution @unil.bsky.social🇨🇭 To kick things off, we’re offering short visiting fellowships for theorists in ecology & evolution. Apply & pls RP 😀 tinyurl.com/2wem36zz

What a joy to finally share the cover of The Organism–Environment Pairing (@mitpress.bsky.social)! The 📗 will be out on May 12 📆! I look forward to the conversations it sparks among scientists, philosophers & historians! mitpress.mit.edu/978026205282... #evosky #histsci #philsci #philsky #booksky 🌱🐋

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating). A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

A new preprint with Matthew Schmitt, @kiseokmicro.bsky.social and Vincenzo Vitelli makes a huge step forward in learning functional groups of components in complex biological systems. It's dimension reduction that speaks to biological function. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Many organisms, including humans, reshape their environments in ways that influence the conditions faced by future generations. We ask whether this can favour biological variation with @irisprigent.bsky.social in our new paper. Thanks to @dee-unil.bsky.social @snsf.ch www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Register for Theory across Biology 2026: 12 June, Bern. One-day meeting on mathematical & theoretical approaches in biology with chalk talks and flip-chart sessions. Ideal for theorists, modelers, and interdisciplinary biologists. Abstracts by: 10 May 2026 Register by: 24 May 2026: buff.ly/svAZ8NF

Yet another awesome single-phage paper from Ido Golding's lab #phagesky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The Epstein files document what many women researchers have long experienced but rarely seen laid bare so starkly: exclusion operating behind closed doors, shaping who gets funded, invited, mentored, and taken seriously. How many of these networks, norms, and gatekeepers remain in place?

📣Next week, we restart our online series with Theo Gibbs (NYU) @theogibbs.bsky.social, who will present: ⭐Do higher-order interactions promote coexistence in diverse ecological communities?⭐ Free and open! Zoom link: iite.info/seminar/ Global time checker: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/f...

📣We will be back soon with a new series of online theory seminars! As ever, free and open for all via Zoom. Follow us on here, or join our email list (iite.info/seminar-emai...) for details. In the meantime, all our past talks are on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@theoretical... See you there!

We have an open Assistant Professor position (tenure track) @ethz.ch in Computational Immunology - ethz.ch/en/the-eth-z... Please apply / share!

Now nicely formatted!

I participated in this summer school a few years ago and it was really fun. Highly recommend 👇

How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller? Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase. 1/n

How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications. My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/ academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Today is the #InternationalDayofWomenandGirlsinScience ✨ To celebrate, we’re opening registration for our workshop "Women in Evolutionary Biology II" — keynotes, research, networking, and discussions on equality & inclusion in science. 📍 Plön (Germany) | 🔗 workshops.evolbio.mpg.de/event/144/ov...

Excited to share first preprint from our lab! @giubotti.bsky.social found that antibiotic tolerance in multispecies biofilms follows a surprising spatial pattern: cells survive only at intermediate distances from a partner species. 🦠 Preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202...

Worried you might miss the EMPSEB 31 abstract submission deadline? Fret not, because we have decided to extend the deadline! Send us your abstracts till February 15, 2026! Mark this one on your calendars so you don't forget!

We're happy to announce our 12th ROTO Workshop: "Diversity in Motion". It will be held on March 26-27 in Bochum. Please register here: rotoworkshop2026.wixsite.com/diversity/co... and tell us if you'll participate in person or online. Registration and participation is free and everybody is welcome!

How do bacterial pangenomes evolve, what controls their dynamics, why do they exist? Fitting a mechanistic model to 450 species from allthebacteria.org suggesting fast vs slow gene exchange (i.e. amount of MGEs) is a major differentiating factor, correlated with phylogeny rather than lifestyle

iDiv Leipzig is organizing a symposium for early career researchers from all fields interested in scientific integrity & reproducibility. Some good stuff, e.g.: @haesleinhuepf.bsky.social on generative AI for science, @rmcelreath.bsky.social on a guerilla approach to scientific workflow.>

New perspective on the evolutionary potential of symbiotic interactions! Is there something special about symbiosis that leads to new traits and adaptations? If so, how would we know and how would this work? academic.oup.com/jeb/advance-...

Lecturer in Ecology and Evolution position available in Biology Department at Stanford University. Apply by April 1, 2026. (Photo by Rick Morris) academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31606

New paper with @vsudbrack.bsky.social. Using pop gen modelling, we show that partial selfing makes selection on tandem repeats more efficient, reducing the associated load across different scenarios. Thanks to @snsf.ch @dee-unil.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social ! www.nature.com/articles/s41...