Julien Luneau

Diagram illustrating "feed the enemy's enemy": ampicillin inhibits Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Citrobacter freundii acidifies the environment, further inhibiting P. aeruginosa.

New preprint from our lab www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...! Andrea Dos Santos and Clément Vulin combine experiments and models showing how adding glucose can strengthen negative interactions between microbial species. This can be used in tandem with antibiotic treatment to inhibit pathogens!

Very excited to see our @nikogeldner.bsky.social lab x Feng Zhou lab work featured on the cover of Science!
(1/5) We reveal how root architecture and nutrient leakage shape spatial patterns of microbial colonization, moving beyond traditional models of uniform exudation.

Congratulations Sebastian!!! Looking forward to all the cool science you will do on Xanthomonas and hydathodes 👏

Congrats Snorre!!! 👏 It's great to see this coming out 🎉
and thank you for giving the chance to be a (small) part of this very cool work!

"Microbes release lower-value metabolites at higher rates" 🦠

Congrats Glen and everyone!!! 👏 Really cool results 🤩

Antagonism as a foraging strategy in microbial communities In natural habitats, nutrient availability limits bacterial growth. We discovered that bacteria can overcome this limitation by acquiring nutrients by lysing neighboring cells through contact-dependen...

Thrilled to share our new paper in @science.org describing our discovery that bacteria can switch from competitors to bonafide predators when resources run dry—arming nanoscale “spears” (T6SS) to stab & consume neighbours.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#MicroSKy #Microbiology

New tenure track assistant professor position in molecular microbiology in our department @dmf-unil.bsky.social @unil.bsky.social! We are casting a wide net for an experimental molecular microbiologist. Apply here: wwwfbm.unil.ch/releve/appli...

Pint of Science was again a great success in Lausanne, with >500 people attending our events!
Kudos to co-coordinators @miriamlisci.bsky.social and @juliensluneau.bsky.social, and to the fantastic team of 19 volunteers at the bars 🥳!

#PINT25 #scicomm

Exploring the untapped potential of single‐cell and spatial omics in plant biology Advances in single-cell and spatial omics technologies have revolutionised biology by revealing the diverse molecular states of individual cells and their spatial organization within tissues. The fie...

Excited to share my new Tansley Review @newphyt.bsky.social on emerging single-cell and spatial omics technologies, many of which are just beginning to be applied in plant biology! Big opportunities lie ahead for the field. [1/n] 

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

3 nights, 3 venues, 2 languages, 27 (!) speakers, this is Pint of Science 2025 in LAUSANNE.

📌 19-21 May 2025 🧬🔭
🌐https://pintofscience.ch/events/lausanne

Free entry 🧠 just come quench your thirst for knowledge!

@pintsworld.bsky.social @icepfl.bsky.social @unil.bsky.social

#pint25 #pintCH

We present MetaFlowTrain, an easy-to-build, highly parallelized, and cost-effective fluidic system for studying microbial exometabolites and their roles in modulating microbe–microbe–host interactions. Kudos to @chesneau-g.bsky.social @mpipz.bsky.social
Give it a try: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks Paloma!

It was great to work with you too! Looking forward to the cool science we can do together in the future 😁

Very happy I could contribute to the story with some single-cell imaging to look at the heterogeneity in flagellar expression and quantify its cost 🔬 I always love these movies, so mesmerizing 🤩

Great to see this out! 🎉 Big congratulations to @type3lab.bsky.social for leading the project and to all involved!

"Pseudomonas syringae subpopulations cooperate by coordinating flagellar and T3SS spatiotemporal dynamics to facilitate plant infection" 🌱🦠 rdcu.be/egczU

🧵⬇️ #MicroSky #PlantScience

There is still time to apply to the Alma Dal Co School on Collective Behaviour! The deadline has been extended till March 16th. We would especially welcome applications from members of underrepresented groups. Limited travel grants are available. Apply now and join us! almadalcoschool.github.io

Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities - npj Biofilms and Microbiomes npj Biofilms and Microbiomes - Disentangling the feedback loops driving spatial patterning in microbial communities

Two (!) perspective pieces published today involving people from our lab! @adelpanta.bsky.social on spatial patterning in microbial communities www.nature.com/articles/s41... and @salazarafra.bsky.social on microbial communities as evolutionary individuals www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Very cool findings!! Congrats to everyone involved 👏

Evolution of a vascular plant pathogen is associated with the loss of CRISPR-Cas and an increase in genome plasticity and virulence genes Paauw et al. report on the evolution of a plant pathogenic Xanthomonas pathovar and show that the gain of mobile genetic elements and virulence factors coincided with the loss of the CRISPR-Cas genome...

➡️ New insights into the evolution of the vascular pathogen Xanthomonas campestris involving the genome defense system CRISPR-Cas! www.cell.com/current-biol... Our data wizard 🪄@mpaauw.bsky.social sequenced almost 100 genomes and this is what he found … /

Congrats Manuel! Very cool findings 👏

It is with great pleasure that I inaugurate my Bluesky account sharing our last @biorxiv-plants.bsky.social at @theustunlab.bsky.social, about pathogen-mediated modulation of host P-bodies and translation. 🆕 🎉

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵 (1/14)

Congrats Tatsuya! Impressive work!

New year, new paper! Now published in @nature.com. We identified and characterised diverse immune cell states in plants under pathogen attack. My postdoc work in the Ecker lab at @salkinstitute.bsky.social. A thread (0/n)
#PlantScience
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Environment‐Organism Feedbacks Drive Changes in Ecological Interactions Ecological interactions are central to our understanding of the composition and function of communities, but attempts to use them as a theoretical foundation for experimental ecology have been confou....

Our framework explaining why ecological interactions change between contexts is out in Ecology Letters!
A lovely collaboration with @saramitri.bsky.social which provides experimentally-testable links between the physiology and ecology of microbes.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Soil microbiomes show consistent and predictable responses to extreme events - Nature Soils from 30 grasslands across Europe were subjected to 4 contrasting extreme climatic events under drought, flood, freezing and heat conditions, with the results suggesting that soil microbiomes fro...

Soil microbiomes show consistent and predictable responses to extreme events
We’re out in Nature !! doi.org/ntzk Very exciting for my first bluesky post! – it’s been a long haul by an excellent team from across Europe, led by @frantecol.bsky.social

Diverse phage defence systems define West African South American pandemic Vibrio cholerae Our understanding of the factors underlying the evolutionary success of different lineages of pandemic Vibrio cholerae remains incomplete. Interestingly, two unique genetic signatures define the West ...

Exciting times! Our latest preprint is now live 🤩!
After nearly 16 yrs of running my lab, I truly believe this is one of the most significant contributions we've made. It offers fresh hypotheses about how pandemic Vibrio cholerae spreads globally. Let’s dive in!🧵..1/n
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Spatially restricted immune and microbiota-driven adaptation of the gut - Nature Intestinal regionalization is characterized by robust and resilient structural cell states and the intestine can adapt to environmental stress in a spatially controlled manner through crosstalk betwee...

Spatially restricted immune and microbiota-driven adaptation of the gut www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I initiated a plant pathology/plant microbe starter pack, feel free to self-nominate 🥀

go.bsky.app/LbYaW8k

Artificial selection improves pollutant degradation by bacterial communities - Nature Communications Artificial selection is a promising way to improve microbial community functions. Here, Arias-Sánchez et al. evaluate a method inspired by genetic algorithms to select small bacterial communities of k...

Our bacterial community breeding experiment is now published! doi.org/10.1038/s414... Huge congratulations to Flora, Björn and all co-authors on making a very ambitious project a reality! In short: you can select communities to improve pollutant degradation (with caveats)

We're looking for an enthusiastic experimentalist PhD student to join our interdisciplinary group interested in the ecology & evolution of microbial communities unil.ch/mitrilab. Apply tinyurl.com/mu5swnk8 before Aug 31! Bonus: Lausanne is a beautiful place to live!