Ellinor Alseth

With @saramitri.bsky.social, @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social and L. Lehmann we’ve launched the UNIL Center for Theory in Ecology and Evolution @unil.bsky.social🇨🇭

To kick things off, we’re offering short visiting fellowships for theorists in ecology & evolution. Apply & pls RP 😀

tinyurl.com/2wem36zz

What a cool piece of funky biology 😎

New preprint on the limits of detecting higher-order interactions in microbial communities.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We find that the dominance of additive and pairwise interactions on community function may not reflect biological simplicity, but fundamental limits of statistical detection.

In Our Time - Bacteriophages - BBC Sounds Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how viruses can help us track and cure bacterial illnesses

🦠 “𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗶𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝘀 — 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘄?”

Historian @kirchhelle.bsky.social chats with 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗮 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗲 & 𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗘𝗯𝗱𝗲𝗻 about revival of phage biology & phage therapy as antibiotics fail.

🎧 2024 BBC Radio 4 — listen worldwide:

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

#phage #phagesky #microsky

After >10 years of our lab studying bacterial cGAS-like enzymes, @hobbslabutah.bsky.social finally reconstitutes viral sensing in vitro and discovers how these ancient receptors sense phage protease enzymes to detect virion assembly and activate antiviral immunity

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Fantastic collaboration w/ @dbikard.bsky.social @audeber.bsky.social @rayanchikhi.bsky.social labs led by @jmouradesousa.bsky.social : We assessed the rates of variation of anti-phage systems in P4-like satellites and P2 helper phages. Quick conclusion: Huge variation! We focus on 4 key questions/5

Cooperation and the evolution of bacterial niche breadth www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... #jcampubs

New post-doctoral research position in my phage-host interactions (Phi) laboratory in @otagomicroimmuno.bsky.social at @universityofotago.bsky.social New Zealand. The project is focused on defences against jumbo phages. Please share and if interested apply using the link in the comments.

In our latest work, we characterise the Tmn defence system. We reveal plasmolysis as a new way to block phage infection, dramatically reducing secondary infections.

Integrating the Microbiome Into Infection Ecology and Evolution in Wild Animals Parasites are a ubiquitous force in nature threatening wildlife populations and ecosystems. Interactions between hosts and their parasites are impacted by host-associated microbiomes, which are essen...

A nice collaboration from post-docs in my lab 😊 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... @jingdi.bsky.social @luismsilva.bsky.social @paradyseb.bsky.social @molecularecolup.bsky.social

Unraveling posttranscriptional regulatory networks in phage infection Phages employ sophisticated transcriptional regulatory networks to optimize replication. Recently, Silverman et al. used RIL-seq (RNA interaction by l…

Like bacteria, phages use sRNAs to regulate gene expression! Out today in @cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social, @mvelascogomariz.bsky.social and I highlight a recent RIL-seq study from the @saharmelamed.bsky.social lab that looked into posttranscriptional regulation of lambda!

tinyurl.com/lambda-RIL-seq

#PhageSky is curious to learn more about this fancy phage 👋

So incredibly excited to have Hermoine join my lab! She's an incredible scientist and I feel so lucky to have her as my first lab group member 🎉 #microsky #phagesky 🦠🧫

➡️ preprint from the lab! Bacteria have loads of antiviral defences in their mobile genetic elements (MGEs). So when MGEs move between bacteria, the defences move with them, generating a fast turnover of defences in bacteria. But what about the antiviral defence turnover in the MGEs themselves? 🤔

🧵👇

Paralog interference contributes to the preservation of genetic redundancy Duplicated self-interacting proteins can interact and interfere with each other’s function. Cisneros, Mattenberger, et al. show that selection against interfering loss-of-function alleles extends the ...

Really fantastic piece of work from @christianlandry.bsky.social et al.,
-elegant set of experiments to uncover mechanisms that contribute to understanding of duplicate retention & redundancy-
Paralog interference contributes to the preservation of genetic redundancy www.cell.com/current-biol...

Given that clonal biofilms of single bacterial species rapidly diversify into niche specialists, how do biofilms of multiple species evolve?
A 🧵 featuring new collaborative pubs:
1. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
2. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📢 Opportunity to apply for a PhD fellowship to join our group and work on MGE-MGE interactions and phage defence systems!
@mmsb-lyon.bsky.social

See informations about eligibility and research project on this web page: graduate-plus.fr/immunology-v...

Contact me if you are interested !

Amazing piece of work I had the great luck to be a part of!

Now I need someone to invent Mordor agar!

Eye of Sauron 2.0

New preprint out on bioRxiv!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Can conjugative plasmids be used to control plasmid and pathogen spread?

Follow me down the rabbit hole that led to this story 🧵

Hi everyone, I am preparing a lecture and was thinking of the milestone papers in the field of bacterial immunity.

I was curious which ones would you include ?

Thanks!

In case you missed it: our review titled "Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities" is out! 🚨

Let me hit you with some highlights on why spatial structure matters. (and why you should care!)

Sharing is appreciated 🙏 🧵👇

doi.org/10.1093/fems...

Ummmm...........nope

Yet another awesome single-phage paper from Ido Golding's lab #phagesky

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Metabolic modeling reveals determinants of prebiotic and probiotic treatment efficacy across multiple human intervention trials Prebiotic and probiotic interventions can induce therapeutically relevant shifts in the human microbiome, but their effects are variable across individuals. This study shows that metabolic models can ...

Latest from @gibbological.bsky.social.

"We [use] microbial community-scale metabolic models to predict probiotic engraftment and microbiota-mediated short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) production in response to probiotic and prebiotic interventions...w/75-80% accuracy."

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

MENI is back! Join us in Dublin this August 2026 for our 3rd Meeting for Microbial Evolution in Ireland. We are delighted to have @rachelmwheatley.bsky.social @drrebeccajhall.bsky.social @jpjhall.bsky.social and @tweethinking.bsky.social join us as keynote speakers this year. miniurl.com/MENI

Next one in a storm of preprints from our lab's amazing scientists.. Recent-ex-postdoc, #newPI @cathyhernandez.bsky.social studied thermal ecology of marine bacteria isolated near New Haven. Turns out, response of this bacterium to temperatures is shaped by prophages!

#phagesky #microsky

🚨 New pre-print! 🚨 In the largest study of its kind to-date, we investigate the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms driving within-patient evolution of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Read here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... , and follow along with this thread, discussing our findings (1/21)