Hard to even know where to begin, but the longer I have delayed the bigger the task… In the past almost four years there have been 27 papers that have come out. Way to go team! I will thus skip mentioning all of them (see publications for all of them), but here are some highlights:
- Former grad student Nick Leiby (now Lead Data Scientist at Kyruus) published a paper describing that metabolic tradeoffs in the Lenski long-term lines primarily arose due to mutation accumulation, rather than antagonistic pleiotropy (Leiby and Marx, 2014. PLoS Biology). This differed from earlier work from Vaughn Cooper and Rich Lenski, and the difference ended up being in the fact that Biolog plates commonly report upon non-growth associated metabolism, and thus are not necessarily a good fitness proxy. Vaughn (now at Pitt) wrote a really classy Primer to our paper about this (Cooper, 2014. PLoS Biology).
- Two former grad students, David Chou (now faculty at Taiwan National University and a father of two) and Nigel Delaney (now a Vice President at GenePeeks and a new father), and collaborator Jeremy Draghi (now faculty at Brooklyn College and also a new father) put together one of my personal favorite papers that showed that epistatic interactions between mutations can be predicted from their individual effects due to the combined effects of catalysis, enzyme costs, and toxicity (Chou et al., 2014. PLoS Genetics). This built upon the classic work from the mid- to late-80s of Tony Dean, Dan Dykhuizen, and Dan Hartl that inspired me to move toward systems biology in the first place.
- We enjoyed contributing to a collaboration led by Dom Schneider at Grenoble that exposed the role of epistasis in an adaptive radiation (Plucain et al., 2014. Science).
- Former postdoc Will Harcombe (now faculty at University of Minnesota) led our contribution to an awesome collaboration with Daniel Segrè‘s lab at Boston University that used flux balance analysis and the concept that individual species in a mixed community can be approximated as behaving according to their own metabolic optimum to predict community dynamics (*Harcombe, *Riehl et al., 2014. Cell Reports; software developed is called COMETS).
- Former postdoc Josh Michener (now Wigner Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory) led a paper – with excellent collaborators Stéphane Vuilleumier and Françoise Bringel from Strasbourg – showing that evolving dichloromethane use across different species of Methylobacterium always involved increasing the ability to export the chloride ions, and in the process led us to identify the beneficial mutations in M. extorquens DM4 that occurred in nature to have evolved this capacity in the first place (Michener et al., 2014. eLife).
- We enjoyed contributing to a collaboration led by Mike Springer at Harvard Medical School that showed yeast respond to the ratio of galactose and glucose (Escalante-Chong et al., 2015. PNAS).
- Former postdoc Sean Carroll (now Senior Scientist at Axcella) led a paper (Carroll et al., 2015. Microorganisms) uncovering the genetic basis of adaptation for strains evolved to grow on methanol with a foreign metabolic pathway, work that began during my own postdoc with Rich Lenski, and first published by David Chou (Chou et al., 2011. Science).
- Former postdoc Deepa Agashe (now INSPIRE Faculty Fellow at National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore), her team there, N. Ceci Martinez-Gomez (now faculty at Michigan State), and our group demonstrated that adaptation to suboptimal codon usage can involve single, large-effect synonymous mutations (Agashe et al., 2016. Molecular Biology and Evolution).
- Former grad student Dipti Nayak (now LSRF Simons Foundation Fellow at University of Illinois) led a paper showing why tradeoffs in using methylamine for a carbon or a nitrogen source explains maintenance of apparent metabolic degeneracy (Nayak et al., 2016. Current Biology).
- Former grad student Sarah Douglas (now Life Science Consultant at Simon-Kucher and Partners) got both of her papers from her thesis out that, together with Will Harcombe, Lon Chubiz, and my colleague Mary Ytreberg (here at Idaho) showed the genetic basis of the in-lab evolution of between-species cooperation of a pair of species (Douglas et al., 2016. PLoS One; Douglas et al., 2017. PLoS One).
- Former postdoc Alex Bradley (now faculty at Washington University, St. Louis) and former lab manager Paige Swanson (now Director of Research Operations at Finch Therapeutics Group) led a paper showing that elimination of hopanoid production in Methylobacterium leads to overproduced carotenoids and widespread growth impairment (*Bradley, *Swanson, et al., 2017. PLoS One).
- Former postdoc Lon Chubiz (now faculty at University of Missouri, St. Louis, and yet another new father) led a paper showing that the metabolic specialist Shewanella oneidensis can evolve glucose use rapidly, but that it comes at a tradeoff for use of other substrates (Chubiz and Marx, 2017. J. Bacteriology).
- My colleague Sergey Stolyar (Research Associate Professor here at Idaho) and I have enjoyed our collaboration with Ankur Dalia and Jake McKinlay at Indiana University, which has already resulted in Ankur’s group leading a paper showing the remarkable power of natural transformation for synthetic biology in Vibrio natriegens (Dalia et al., 2017. ACS Synthetic Biology).
It would be hard for me to be more proud of how well people from my lab have done… Looking forward to future updates about the current lab, which besides Sergey Stolyar mentioned above, includes postdocs Jessica Lee, Tomislav Ticak, Jannell Bazurto, and Eric Bruger, BCB grad student Siavash Riazi, and UGs Alyssa Baugh, Caleb Renshaw, Leah Lambert, and Nick Renn.
Marx-Udekwu Joint Lab 