evolutionary biologist, microbe enthusiast, math junkie, dog lover, caffeine repository Professor of Biology, University of Washington (he/him)
Seattle
Joined August 2013
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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”🧵academic.oup.com/mbe/article…
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.”
This work was spearheaded by @livkosterlitz in collaboration with @nate_grassi, @baileymwerner, @RS_McGee, and @EvaTop3. We are thrilled to see it appear in @MolBioEvol!
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
🔴 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). biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
Exciting new resource for math bio folks!
🚨🚨New textbook alert!!🚨🚨
Introducing Mathematical Biology: An Open Education Resource
sheffield.pressbooks.pub/int…
Key points:
* It's FREE
* It's interactive
* It's accessible
* It's...standard math-bio content for undergrads but did I mention it's FREE?
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
I am so excited to read this! I love how each of these authors thinks!
What prevents multicellular organisms from evolving back to their ancestral state of unicellularity? In a new preprint, @peterlconlin, Heather Goldsby and colleagues show how division of labor can lead to the entrenchment of multicellularity. 🧵(1/14)
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
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!
evolutionsociety.org/news/di…
@sarperotto @Evol_mtg
ALT Text: Sarah Sally Otto, 2023 Society for the Study of Evolution Lifetime Achievement Award. Headshot of Sally Otto.
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
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.
A wonderful new resource for HGT research! After separately contributing creative new techniques to measure plasmid conjugation, @livkosterlitz & @Jana_Huisman teamed up to write a comprehensive and insightful set of guidelines on the topic. Check out the thread and paper! 👇
Ever wondered about estimating & reporting plasmid conjugation rates? We did too! Excited to share our new paper in Plasmid, where we propose guidelines for estimating & reporting these experiments. authors.elsevier.com/c/1h3ZU… Thread👇
In case you're looking for an article to inspire you, check out this superb new offering from @ozan_g_b, @dahaj1897, @YunkerLab, @wc_ratcliff, and their colleagues. Big congratulations (even bigger than the evolved yeast snowflakes!) to the team on this exciting work!!
Out now in @Nature:
De novo evolution of macroscopic multicellularity
By G. Ozan Bozdag, Seyed Alireza Zamani-Daha, Peter Yunker, William Ratcliff & colleagues.
@wc_ratcliff
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
Rapid recombination is an important driver of HIV intra-host evolution. Because recombination requires that multiple viruses co-infect a cell, Elena Romero and I wondered if high viral loads increase HIV's recombination rate.
tl;dr: we think they do!
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
@CurrentBiology just published two cool papers on the role of life cycles in the evolution of multicellularity. One by @EvolvingMurray and Julien Barrere, and the other by @Hammerschmidt_K et al.
@peterlconlin and I discuss them in this Insight article:
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
