Purely “Lamarckian” evolution?

Yup, I really wrote that.  In a lab so strongly influenced by Darwin, I just invoked the name of Lamarck, who is often framed as the anti-Darwin. In no way am I defending any aspect of Lamarck’s support of the “Great chain of being” to describe the (super)natural progression of organisms through time. Rather, I

We’ve welcomed a number of new lab members in the past months

It has been a pleasure to bring some new faces into the lab over the past months. Olivia Speare – now Olivia Benski – has transitioned from an undergrad to a technician working on our EPSCoR project with Tomislav. Monica Pedroni has joined us a second lab technician, and has been working with Sergey on

Congrats to Dipti on starting her lab at Berkeley

This summer Dipti Nayak began her Assistant Professor position in Molecular and Cellular Biology at UC Berkeley. I am very excited for her, and was thrilled to visit her new space last month when in the area. She brings the total number of PIs from the lab to ten… Best wishes to her!

Sergey and I wrote a Preview for Cell paper on defining microbial populations

In the morass of metagenomic sequence data on microbes, it is unclear what a unit should even be in a community. Ideally, one would want to uncover the core populations present: the set of strains that actually are exchanging genetic information and are reasonably cohesive, even in the presence of a degree of input from

Jessica and I enjoyed writing Perspective for new Science paper on evolvability

None of us are looking for extra work to do, but when invited to write a Perspective for this great paper out of the lab of Andreas Wagner, Jessica Lee (now at Global Viral) and I made time to make it happen. The Research Article from Zheng et al. – “Cryptic genetic variation accelerates evolution

Great commentary by Jennifer Farrell and Sam Brown on our new PNAS paper

What a wonderful surprise! I had no idea PNAS was doing a commentary on our paper, and then I found this excellent piece written by Jennifer Farrell and Sam Brown (Georgia Tech). They end their piece hoping that Will Harcombe (now at U. Minnesota) continued to evolve the two-species system described in this paper. Thankfully

Review published on role of sequencing in revolutionizing studies of experimental evolution.

Eric Bruger and I penned a review (Bruger and Marx, 2018. Current Opinion in Microbiology) that seeks to address the manner in which sequencing technologies have opened the door to whole new questions in experimental evolution. It was a joy to highlight the incredible work our field has accomplished in such a short time. I

Two papers led by Will Harcombe – one in PNAS – on cooperation in synthetic communities

In the past months we have had two papers on the E. coli–S. enterica system that Will Harcombe developed, and worked on when he was a postdoc in the lab. One of these (Hynes et al., 2018. Biomedical Physics and Engineering Express) reports the ability to examine communities via bioprinting, and also represented a collaboration

Papers stemming from KnipBio

Back in 2013, I co-founded KnipBio with Larry Feinberg. KnipBio’s goal is to develop Methylobacterium as an aquaculture feed ingredient that can simultaneously reduce the need for fishmeal-derived protein and provide high-value components and properties. In the past two years, our first publications have come out describing the successful use of this single-cell protein with

Congrats to Siavash for a successful PhD defense

This past Tuesday, 11/13, Siavash Riazi presented his defense for a PhD in BCB entitled “Mathematical modeling and analysis of gene expression to understand phenotypic heterogeneity and the response of Methylobacterium extorquens to formaldehyde toxicity.” His work was co-advised by Chris Remien (Mathematics) and me, and represents his first PhD student, and my first to