End of Summer Update.

In the past month and a half we’ve had four new papers come out. First is one led by myself and Stephane Vuilleumier in Journal of Bacteriology announcing the genome sequences of six strains of Methylobacterium. Second, Hsuan-Chao Chiu, his then-mentor Daniel Segre and I have a follow-up to last year’s Science paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that extends some general theory that considers how epistasis arises from the dependence of fitness upon underlying traits. Third, David Robinson and Miki Lee (former undergrad and grad student, respectively) led a paper that came out in Nucleic Acids Research describing a new program (OASIS) for automated annotation of transposable elements from genome sequences and some surprising findings regarding their distribution. Finally, Nick Leiby and Will Harcombe worked to report in BMC Evolutionary Biology that a few of the Lenski long-term E. colipopulations have become dependent upon citrate for growth on glucose.