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.

New preprint out on bioRxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Can conjugative plasmids be used to control plasmid and pathogen spread? Follow me down the rabbit hole that led to this story 🧵

New pre-print with @wtmatlock.bsky.social!!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... What shapes the distribution of plasmids across bacteria? Our paper shows that conjugative plasmids actually have a very narrow distribution compared to mobilizable plasmids. Conjugative systems restrict plasmid transfer!

The incomparable Zong roped @wvschaik.bsky.social and I into a comment for Nature Comms on microbiome mediated colonisation resistance to combat Klebsiella www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What a fantastic new addition to my lab! 🚀 Welcome @albertohca.bsky.social to the @uam.es family! Stay tuned for the science we’re going to build together in the coming years!

A short research stay in 2019 (back in the pre-COVID era) at José R. Penadés lab turned into the third chapter of my PhD and today it finally sees the light.

How does population density affect evolutionary trajectory? Microbes construct their own niche which in turn reshapes their evolution. Preprint drop from grad student @noahhoupt.bsky.social whose evolution experiments featured blue/white colonies, 1000 generations, a lab move, and much more!

New #BehindThePaper for our latest paper in @natcomms.nature.com (rdcu.be/e2qMK) Secret Invasion: Strain Fate Across Microbiomes Cover illustration by Helena Klein (@illuzation.bsky.social). communities.springernature.com/posts/secret...

🧬New paper out! We report the first isolation of viable B. bacteriovorus predators from human gut microbiota. www.frontiersin.org/journals/mic.... Great work of Mario Romero @migueldiezfdz.bsky.social @josete600.bsky.social and @rosacampo.bsky.social

In this issue: Fresh light on horse evolution, mangrove restoration as coastal flood protection, and the links between aerobic metabolism and planetary oxygenation. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/yB6J50Y5ykK

New paper out in PNAS!!! 🎉 Do more plasmid copies mean faster evolution? 🧵 Dive into the story www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper out in @pnas.org, and it made the cover! 👁️ We represent plasmids as circles and mutations as dots, resembling an eye, because in this paper we literally 𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ plasmids evolve. ‼️Check Paula’s 🧵 and the paper👇 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘀𝗺𝗶𝗱 𝗺𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗰𝗼𝗽𝘆 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Application deadline for this postdoc position in my group closing next week 🦠 thank you all who have shared so far!

Lab ready. Looking forward to what comes next here.

New preprint out! 📣🚨 We found that loss-of-function mutations in the carbapenem entry porin OprD of Pseudomonas aeruginosa do more than confer #AntibioticResistance: they reshape the bacterial membrane and interaction with the host, enhancing epithelial colonization capacity 🦠 #Microsky

I’m excited to share this article from my PhD, exploring the role and prevalence of peptide deformylases! It has been a truly enriching and fascinating scientific journey. Thank you, @amazeld.bsky.social, for welcoming me into your lab and giving me the scientific freedom to follow my curiosity!

Our story on plasmid streamlining is now published in PLoS Biology! With @andrewmatthews.bsky.social and @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social #MicroSky #Mevosky journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

I'm so happy that I can finally share the results of my first postdoc paper with @baym.lol!!! Turns out plasmids are an amazing system to study multi-scale evolution and we can track within-cell and between-cell dynamics! (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/earl...

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/...

2/ 🤝 This project is carried out at @cnb-csic.bsky.social is conducted in consortium with @tmcoque.bsky.social (Instituto Ramón y Cajal de Investigación Sanitaria).

1/ Antibiotic resistance causes ➕ than 1 M deaths each year and understanding why this happens is key to stopping it. With #HealthResearch support, @sanmillan.bsky.social#HealthResearchis investigating how different plasmids (DNA fragments) coexist in bacteria and confer resistance. https://tinyurl.com/3bysv6cr

New paper out 🎆 When an antibiotic-resistant E. coli strain lands in our gut microbiome, whether it will get established or not depends on the ecological context. We studied how other microbes, nutrients, and antibiotic exposure shape its fate.👇

Can we leverage bacterial competition for targeted replacement of harmful strains? Maybe! Our recent piece in @natmicrobiol.nature.com provides a theoretical framework and a set of experiments to show what it might take: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper “Global dissemination of npmA mediated pan‑aminoglycoside resistance via a mobile element in Gram‑positive bacteria” is now in @natcomms.nature.com. Part of my freshly defended PhD, so doubly happy! 😄🎉 🧵 (1/14) www.doi.org/10.1038/s414...

🚨 Excited to share our new paper is out! 🎉 We show how interactions within gut microbiomes allow certain antibiotic-resistant E. coli strains to persist even without antibiotics, helping explain how resistance is maintained in the human gut. Now published in @natcomms.nature.com rdcu.be/eOf63

New(ish!) paper on how within-host competition and antibiotic resistance shape the fitness of Streptococcus pneumoniae serotypes, out in August in Plos Biology. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

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...

Do plasmids really move around that much? Well, maybe not always Thrilled to have contributed to this story with two of my favourite microbiologists: @jrpenades.bsky.social & @sanmillan.bsky.social This great work was led by Akshay Sabnis & @wfigueroac3.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell-reports...

This work is finally published! 🥳🧬 Plasmids are associated with very variable fitness costs in their different bacterial hosts. But, what is the contribution of each of the plasmid-genes in these host-specific effects? Study led by @jorgesastred.bsky.social, @sanmillan.bsky.social and myself! 1/14

Can we exploit past phage infection events (prophages) to decipher the specificity of phage receptor-binding proteins such as depolymerases?🔎 Happy to share our recent work at @natcomms.nature.com 🔽 #microsky #phagesky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Invited speaker Marco La Fortaleza starts the first session of the day talking about epigenetic diversification in bacterial multicellularity. #Multicellverse

Do restriction-modification systems shape plasmid sequence composition? A group of plasmid-aficionados, led by Liam Shaw, started to explore this during the 2023 @embo.org Workshop on Plasmids in Trieste. Happy to have contributed to this work and be part of such a great team!

Really looking forward to this!! 👇

🚨 Seminar at ETH this Thursday! 🚨 Join Dr. Jerónimo Rodríguez-Beltrán (@jerorb.bsky.social) for a talk on how plasmids shape antibiotic resistance. Plasmid evolution: a (copy) numbers game 🗓 April 3rd | 🕙 10:00–11:00 📍 CHN F42, ETH Zurich evodynamicslab.com

🚨 Excited to share that our new study, “ESKAPE pathogens rapidly develop resistance against antibiotics in development in vitro” is published in @naturemicrobiol.bsky.social. For details, see the 🧵below and read the paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Our latest research in @naturecomms.bsky.social shows a promising strategy for less resistance-prone #antibiotics. For details, see the thread below and read the paper “Exploring the principles behind antibiotics with limited resistance” here: #MEvoSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We kicked off this semester's #SMEE with two great talks by @dnasaur.bsky.social and @phagemuffin.bsky.social. @usyseth.bsky.social

Really glad I could contribute to this work exploring biofilm formation, mucoidy and tip adhesin diversity in #klebsiella. For those in #KLEBS2024, I provided a sneak peak of the potential relation between K3 serotype & HMV This is also my first publication since I joined @cbitoulouse.bsky.social !

Really happy to see this paper out. Extra special for me because it marks my first research publication. Aswin has officially entered the academic world! 📈🦠🧑‍💻

New paper from our group in @pnas.org!! 🚀 Malte Mütter used our amazing liquid-handling robot to test different treatment strategies and found that combination therapy is the most effective to prevent the emergence of plasmid-mediated double resistance www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Can E.coli 🦠 escape from predation by ‘living antibiotic’ 💊B.bacteriovorus, a predatory bacterium ? A first preprint from my lab for people interested in: #MicroSky, #Evolution and new ways to treat #AMR and #Bdellovibrio www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Some findings in the following thread:

Should I stay or should I go? 🎵 In a new opinion piece, Claudia Igler, Andrina Bernhard and I discuss how conjugative plasmids and temperate bacteriophages balance vertical and horizontal transmission: ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v... Our framework sheds light on many aspects of MGE biology (1/7)

Next in my To Read list! Surely great & thorough work from Alex Hall, led by @rleonsampedro.bsky.social Read his thread here 👇🏻👇🏻

New in Nature Comms, we show that azole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus are more likely to evolve resistance to new antifungals due to variants in their DNA mismatch repair system rdcu.be/d3Iyc @natureportfolio.bsky.social #microsky #fungi #amr

Nora finished her paper with a sentence I like a lot "Our results show that even under extremely restrictive, competitive conditions, the simplest biological entities on Earth can still find paths to coexistence." There is a curious dichotomy in her experiments... 1/3 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New preprint by the group I am doing my PhD in: “Chromosomal plasticity can drive rapid adaptation in bacteria”. This is the first chapter of Ever Vega-Cabrera's thesis and has been in the works for a long time. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.12.11.627208 […]

Very glad to see this properly out and open access from my time with @baym.lol We've learnt so much about antibiotic resistance evolution already, and yet so many outstanding and fascinating questions remain, at all levels of selection. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Possible explains our displacement papers www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

PhD opportunity in St Andrews on plasmids, antibiotics and defence systems, in collaboration with Helen Alexander in Edinburgh. Funding via BBSRC EastBio, please share & pass on to anyone interested! #microsky🦠🧫🧬 www.findaphd.com/phds/project...