Beautiful morning in the Smokies at SEPEEG 2025. Listening to Fisher’s geometric model, with coffee, in the mountain air, just hits different. 🏔️ ☕️

Our lab is hiring!! We are looking for a research assistant who will be involved with our experimental evolution studies on how stress affects population dynamics in E. coli. Great opportunity for recent grads! E-mail for more info and apply here: ecsr.fa.us2.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Eis: machine learning to reverse-engineer #evolution. Brassington (@amandalea.bsky.social): Evolutionary mismatch. Rose: Genome-scale models. Bruder (@megbehri.bsky.social): Computational & experimental microbial evolution.

Really proud of Owen Hale, a Ph.D. Candidate in our group who was awarded the Gut Microbiome, Yogurt and Probiotic Fellowship by Danone North America. Owen’s research focuses on E. coli / Lactic Acid Bacteria interactions! www.prnewswire.com/news-release...

Microbial cross-feeding stabilized by segregation of a dependent mutant from its independent ancestor #ISMEJournal by @ofsheff.bsky.social et al from @jakemckinlay.bsky.social academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

Really proud of PhD Candidate Carl Stone, advocating for science and scientific funding by wiring this opinion piece for his hometown newspaper in Minnesota.

An Anaerobic Pathogen Rewires Host Metabolism to Fuel Oxidative Growth in the Inflamed Gut https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.31.657111v1

Given that there are 435 voting members of Congress, I would have hoped for more than 25% of House members to support American innovation in science and technology. 112? That’s it? No one else wants answers?!?!

Very cool new work by @megbehri.bsky.social and William F. McLaughlin: Starvation drives co-existence in cross-feeding bacterial populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks for the Signal Boost, Ákos! We’re so happy to see our review discussing Rho as an evolutionary capacitor out in Transcription! It’s an exciting follow up to our recent research article & opens up a discussion of where we expect evolutionary capacitors to exist b/w the genotype/phenotype gap.

Excited to announce our latest manuscript on bioRxiv! Led by PhD student Owen Hale, we anaerobically examine the mutation rates of aerotolerant anaerobic species of Lactic Acid Bacteria: Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus crispatus, and Lactococcus lactis.

Congratulations to @emmiamueller.bsky.social on: "Residence time structures microbial communities through niche partitioning" Now out in Ecology Letters: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Really enjoyed visiting NC State for the Genetics and Genomics seminar yesterday! Got to chat with a great group of researchers, heard awesome science, and the food scene in Raleigh was pretty yum! 🧬🧫

I am confident that scientific societies will play an unusually important role in the coming years. If you are a microbiologist of any kind, please consider joining @asm.org if you haven't already. There are many ways to get involved, including advocacy. To learn more: asm.org/About-ASM/Vo...

To all the other professors who also opened their labs in the middle of COVID and are now going to go up for tenure during this mess, I see you. 🤦‍♀️

Applications are open for the Microbial Population Biology GRS and GRC! The GRS is a fun day for grad students and postdocs to network before the full GRC starts, and is co-chaired this year by me and Laura Suttenfield Get your applications in by Jan 15! #evosky 🦠🧪 www.grc.org/microbial-po...

Excited for the upcoming #VUEvoMag Magazine! " @megbehri.bsky.social reached out to me a few weeks after my lab opened at Vanderbilt with this interesting observation about solution pH, but wondered if there was a way we could measure pH inside cells," Bratton recalled. loom.ly/a1hXE2o

Introducing our lab’s newest Ph.D candidate William McLaughlin. William is doing an awesome microbial systems ecology project that’s already turning out some cool results. Keep an eye out for this rising star.

🚨This week in @PNASNews 🚨 Our new paper led by postdoc @sb_worthan examining a pH sensitive substitution in the Rho transcription terminator that evolved experimentally in our lab and then is found in natural populations! Thread below! 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Had a great time last night watching @NashvilleSC win with the Vanderbilt Mathematics Department. Thanks for letting this biologist join, there’s no better way to watch a game than in the VU box! ⚽️⚓️🧑‍🏫

Another great collaboration lead by the McKinlay lab ( @jakemckinlay.bsky.social ) if you like experimental evolution, microbial crossfeeding, and investigations of the Black Queen Hypothesis, this is for you!!

This new work out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social is part of our ongoing collab w/ Wei-Chin Ho! If you are at #TAGC24, Poster #777🎰 covers this & our follow up work on pH sensing mutations in transcription termination!

Hot off the presses! 📰📰 E. coli evolution in repeated 100-day Feast/Famine cycles is out in @currentbiology.bsky.social! We see high mutational order, extreme parallelism (nucleotide level!),& early mutations can ⬆️ fitness simultaneously for growth & survival! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bacterial adenine cross-feeding stems from a purine salvage bottleneck @ISMEJournal from @jakemckinlay.bsky.social academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

Preprint Alert! 🚨🚨🚨 Exciting collaboration between my group, @MarcBoudvillain’s group and @bpbratton! From populations experimentally evolved to extreme feast/famine cycles, we find pH-sensing rho alleles that confer pH-dependent plasticity in transcription termination!

Good Morning Bluesky! I’m excited to share our study in #mbio led by PhD candidate @StarlCone investigating 6mA evolution in E. coli! 🥳🧫🧬 Carl developed an R package (CoMMA) for differential methylation analysis of 6mA, so you can analyze differential 6mA too! journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...