Mike Blazanin

mBio Journal Homepage mBio covers the enormity of the interconnected microbial world: from symbiosis to pathogenesis, energy acquisition and conversion, climate change, geologic change, food and drug production, and even ...

Delighted to have started my tenure as an editor for mBio journals.asm.org/journal/mbio handling papers on Streptomyces, natural product evolution and biosynthesis, experimental evolution, bacteriophage resistance, Corynebacterium and engineering biology

Do birds tune their songs to their hearing?

Is there tight coevolution between avian vocal signals and hearing-or do signallers and perceivers evolve more loosely?

It turns out perfect tuning is not required...

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#bioacoustics
#prattle 💬
#ornithology 🪶

Metagenomic estimation of absolute bacterial biomass in the mammalian gut through host-derived read normalization | mSystems In this study, we asked whether normalization by host reads alone was sufficient to estimate absolute bacterial biomass directly from stool metagenomic data, without the need for synthetic spike-ins, ...

You can get an accurate estimate of total bacterial biomass from stool metagenomes by simply normalizing by host read count, without needing any additional measurements.

Excellent work by UW Master's student Gechlang Tang in @asm.org #mSystems Journal.

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
🧵

Mike Blazanin Microbiology, Ecology, and Evolution

Hi! I'm a post-doc at UBC studying microbial ecology and evolution. My research focuses on how bacteria are shaped by their interactions with other bacteria, phages, and their hosts, using both experiments and mathematical modeling.
mikeblazanin.com

Wow!!

🧪BREAKING: NIH has laid out 5 options for funding publications costs on grants (yes, FIVE!). This is hugely impactful.

Make your opinions known by September 15, fellow scientists.
🧪
grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Mechanisms of microbiome assembly and approaches to uncover the ecological forces driving it.

Deriving ecological models solely from observational data limits our ability to understand mechanisms driving microbiome assembly. This #mSystems articles explores how experimental approaches can address these challenges. asm.social/2wj

Thrilled to share our new article in @pnas.org highlighting global gaps in where we study animal movement—and outlining the next generation of smart bio-loggers.

👉 Read the full study in PNAS: lnkd.in/exP8NCeZ
1/

Several years ago I performed a meta-analysis. I (mostly) found the papers using a Boolean statement in Web of Science. I’m interested in doing a similar search. How do folks recommend that I do this now? What are your favorite tools to do targeted and systematic literature searches these days?

Within-host bacterial evolution and the emergence of pathogenicity - Nature Microbiology In this Review, Tonkin-Hill et al. discuss the processes driving bacterial evolution and emergence of pathogenesis within hosts, the importance of understanding within-host genetic diversity, and the ...

#Review

A discussion on the processes driving bacterial evolution and emergence of pathogenesis within hosts, the importance of understanding within-host genetic diversity, and the implications for transmission analysis and infectious disease control.

#MicroSky 🦠

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A new version of gcplyr (1.12.0) has just been released and is available now from CRAN and github. This update fixes a handful of bugs along with some improvements to the documentation

mikeblazanin.github.io/gcplyr/

For what I consider the best inter-generational study to date @jamiehackett.bsky.social used over 2,000 mice.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

While that's a lot of mice, it is better animal welfare to perform a definitive study than to perform hundreds of uninterpretable studies.

Cyanophage Infections in a Sponge Intracellular Cyanobacterial Symbiont Intracellular cyanobacterial symbionts of sponges are shown to be susceptible to cyanophages, challenging assumptions about their isolation from viral exposure. The study reveals novel phage–host int...

Our paper on cyanophages of marine sponge symbionts is finally out. It is the outcome of a great collaboration with Laura Steindler's lab and was led by Tzipora Perez.

Come join EEB at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Evolutionary Genomics, Assistant Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Fall 2026
apply.interfolio.com/170735
functional and evolutionary genomics in any system 🌱, 🦠, or 🦌 (including 👫)

Experimental evolution in an era of molecular manipulation Nature Reviews Genetics, Published online: 21 July 2025; doi:10.1038/s41576-025-00867-6In this Review, Ascensao and Desai discuss how methodological advances in genotype and phenotype manipulation are transforming experimental evolution approaches and providing new insights into the underlying genetics and forces that shape phenotypic evolution.

ICYMI: New online! Experimental evolution in an era of molecular manipulation

Hints of hidden heritability in GWAS - Nature Genetics Although susceptibility loci identified through genome-wide association studies (GWAS) typically explain only a small proportion of the heritability, a classical quantitative genetic analysis now argu...

Does anyone know who first used the term "Manhattan Plot"?

Wikipedia links to a 2010 paper by Greg Gibson. I haven't yet found an earlier use, but Greg's phrasing suggests that he did not invent the term.
doi.org/10.1038/ng07...

Macrophage-induced reduction of bacteriophage density limits the efficacy of in vivo pulmonary phage therapy - Nature Communications In vivo experiments and mathematical modelling in this work, show that alveolar macrophages lower phage densities and phage-bacteria contact rates, limiting the effectiveness of synergistic treatment ...

Alveolar macrophages limit phage therapy by clearing phages; their depletion boosts phage efficacy against P. aeruginosa in murine lung infection. #MicroSky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am listening to @caseynewton.bsky.social and @kevinroose.com on Hard Fork while flying home from the Yeast meeting in Paris, and you know what fellas?

Telling yeast how to behave is what thousands of yeast scientists do. In fact, we love them precisely because they are easy to engineer!

A human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins mediates immunity via the Toll-like receptor pathway Key actors of mammalian immunity originated from bacterial antiphage systems. The full extent of immune system conservation between bacteria and eukaryotes is unknown. Here, we show that the silent in...

𝓐𝓝𝓒𝓘𝓔𝓝𝓣 𝓞𝓡𝓘𝓖𝓘𝓝𝓢 𝓞𝓕 𝓘𝓝𝓝𝓐𝓣𝓔 𝓘𝓜𝓜𝓤𝓝𝓘𝓣𝓨

Bacterial antiphage systems: source of cGAS-STING and gasdermins

Now new conserved family described in 𝘚𝘊𝘐𝘌𝘕𝘊𝘌: “SIRims”

NAD⁺-degrading proteins found across domains of life

Human SIRim protein (SIRa1) activates TLR signaling and restricts HSV-1 and 𝘚𝘢𝘭𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢!

Was just sent this, author unknown. There's plenty to debate but they're right about evolutionary ecology. 🌏

Bacterial Schlafens mediate anti-phage defense Human Schlafen proteins restrict viral replication by cleaving tRNA, thereby suppressing protein synthesis. Although the ribonuclease domain of Schlafen proteins is conserved across all domains of lif...

First preprint from the Nemudryi Lab! 🍾

In this work, we link antiviral immunity in bacteria and humans by showing that homologs of human Schlafen nucleases protect bacteria from phages.

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

Run to this opportunity!

"We seek ... scientists who define and address fundamental questions in any area of modern biology, including but not limited to basic and biomedical sciences, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, structural biology, cell biology, developmental biology, systems biology, and computational biology."

We are on the lookout for postdocs for two different projects at the intersection of ecology, evolution, and the human microbiome.

See thread for more information and reach out!

Eco-evolutionary robustness of wild bacterial communities to experimental perturbation Abstract. Most knowledge about bacterial evolution and ecological interactions comes from laboratory studies. One difference between the wild and most labo

🚨Fresh out of press!
How do wild bacterial communities respond to environmental perturbations like liming?
We experimentally evolved them to find out!
academic.oup.com/ismej/articl...

I don't disagree and I have data (now rather old but I bet still relevant) to support this.

loop.nigms.nih.gov/2011/06/prod...

A high-resolution two-step evolution experiment in yeast reveals a shift from pleiotropic to modular adaptation Evolution is expected to involve mutations that are small and modular in effect, but recent findings suggest that mutations early in an adaptive process can have strong and pleiotropic effects. This s...

Having a great time at #smbe2025! So many great talks and conversations. Thank you again to @iamphioxus.bsky.social for the opportunity to present our work! Much of it is from the paper by @grantkinsler.bsky.social and @yuping-li.bsky.social journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... 1/n

graphical abstract of the article the extended mobility of plasmids

Here's our new broad review on the extended mobility of plasmids, about all mechanisms driving and limiting their transfer. From conjugation to conduction, phage-plasmids to hitchers, molecular to evolutionary dynamics, ecology to biotech. The state of affairs. 1/9 academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Imidazole propionate is a driver and therapeutic target in atherosclerosis - Nature Imidazole propionate produced by gut microbiota is associated with atherosclerosis in mouse models and in humans, and causes the development of atherosclerosis through activation of the imidazoline-1 ...

Fascinating new paper reveals a new gut microbiome connection to heart disease. Microbes produce imidazole propionate (ImP), which directly triggers atherosclerosis through immune activation - even without high cholesterol.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Are any of my followers aware of microbes that code for aerobic metabolism but can not grow aerobically?

That is are there physiologically obligate anaerobes that contain genetic machinery for oxidative metabolism?

#microsky