Ellie Rand

What is the best strategy to win any contest?

Eliminate your opponents of course.

Recently, my friend @fernpizza.bsky.social showed how plasmids compete intracellularly (check out his paper published in Science today!). With @baym.lol, we now know they can fight.

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

Loved having a chance this weekend to showcase the science behind bioluminescence & talk about the bioluminescent bays of Puerto Rico at the Harvard Museum's Celebremos Puerto Rico 🕺🇵🇷!

Can I be added please? Thank you so much for setting this up!

The Phage DisCo method originated in the @baym.lol lab where it was primarily developed by @ellie-rand.bsky.social. The project had received support through five separate federal grants, all of which were part of the mass termination of Harvard grants three weeks ago.

🎙️New PhageLine episode out now! This week, we discuss targeted #discovery of bacteriophages by co-culture.🦠🔬
New episodes every Sunday, 12 AM CEST.
🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, any Podcatcher or here:
t1p.de/phageline
#PhageLine#Podcast#Bacteriophages#PhageDisCo

Phage DisCo is out in mSystems!! Super useful (and beautiful) method for targeted phage discovery for your every need :)

I'll also add: all five federal grants that supported different parts this work were part of the mass termination of Harvard grants three weeks ago

Phage DisCo: targeted discovery of bacteriophages by co-culture | mSystems In this work, we describe a targeted phage discovery method that allows immediate isolation of phages with specific traits. Currently, to find a phage with specific properties, huge libraries of phage...

The latest work from my lab, Phage Disco, a method
@ellie-rand.bsky.social
developed for targeted discovery of bacteriophages based on the bacterial receptor, defense system, or other component they interact with, is now live in mSystems
journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

💙💙

Thank you, Sophia!! Finding the inspirational poster on the ceiling of the gym locker room was a turning point 😂💪 I’m lucky to have had you in my lab and in my Pilates class ❤️

Finally I can post my photo compilation of people accidentally twinning with figures from this paper

Stacked bar chart (upside down but still) @theshreyaspai.bsky.social @baym.lol

1/3

My scientific career changed the day I met Fernando and my faith in science restored. In a world dominated by sequencing and LLMs, this project shows how much biology is hidden in plain sight waiting for the right person to make the connection, a must read for any scientist!

Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics Conflicts between levels of biological organization are central to evolution, from populations of multicellular organisms to selfish genetic elements in microbes. Plasmids are extrachromosomal, self-r...

I'm so happy that I can finally share the results of my first postdoc paper with @baym.lol!!! Turns out plasmids are an amazing system to study multi-scale evolution and we can track within-cell and between-cell dynamics!
(1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/earl...

This is a super cool science story, but maybe also a deeper message for current events… Even though the light is much dimmer in the past few weeks, we need to survive and be ready to thrive when even a small bit returns! Channel your inner Arctic phytoplankton! 🧪

Post the amazing science things you have done with federal funding.

This paper has been a long time coming: We looked at the genomes of historical bacterial samples over a century to look for trends of antibiotic resistance genes, finding multiple instances of them in infections before the age of antibiotics, but an increase in both frequency and mobility after

50 years after its discovery, the role of the T7 kinase is finally revealed - shielding the phage against a wide variety of bacterial immune systems. Very interesting work from the Savitski & Typas labs

Bright green spots are phages (viruses), bacteria are the faint rods in light blue.

We developed a microscopy-based technique🔬 to measure attachment of viruses #phages to host cells. 🦠

The paper was posted online today:
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

#phagesky #microsky

Diverse phage communities are maintained stably on a clonal bacterial host Bacteriophages are the most abundant and phylogenetically diverse biological entities on Earth, yet the ecological mechanisms that sustain this extraordinary diversity remain unclear. In this study, w...

Is it “winner-takes all” when the simplest living things compete? Check out my fresh publication on phage coexistence in Science and a thread below🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A figure comparing box plot and showing all data points. Group1: normally distributed data. Group2: bimodal data. Group3: Data with 3 modes.

Friends don't let friends make bad graphs repo has been updated!

Friends don't let friends use boxplot for binomial (bimodal) data. Is your box plot hiding something from you?

#DataVisualization

github.com/cxli233/Frie...

Hey bsky! In case you missed it, we recently pushed out a preprint showcasing the Phage DisCo method for targeted phage discovery. First author @ellie-rand.bsky.social wrote an excellent tweet thread with the highlights bsky.app/profile/elli... I am very exited about this method! Here's why... 1/

A version of the kermit vs darth kermit meme where good kermit tells the online academic that they should grade, while darth kermit tells them they should eat more pie.

Every academic right now

The first review article from my lab, helmed by @celiasouque.bsky.social, "From Petri Dishes to Patients to Populations: Scales and Evolutionary Mechanisms Driving Antibiotic Resistance" is now online and open access at Annual Reviews Microbiology:
www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

We've long been able to find new phages and figure out what they interact with. But what about the other direction: if you have a gene, like an antibiotic resistance efflux pump, or a phage defense system, and you want to find phages that do or do not interact with it?

Now you can!

Thank you so much to everyone who has worked on this project with us! It’s been so much fun to hear about the phages people are interested in isolating. We are so excited about the upcoming collaborations to put this method to good use! 9/9

Phage DisCo has proven to be a reliable way to target phage discovery. It can be modified to your chosen phage characteristics of interest by selecting which strains to screen on. The only requirements are genetic tractability of the bacterial host and an environmental sample to screen! 8/

Yet again, the DisCo ball (fluorescence) led us quickly to phages of interest. The hits were isolated and confirmed by plaque assays on monoculture lawns of each strain. 7/

What about other bacterial factors that phages interact with during infection? To test this, we co-cultured a wildtype E. coli with an isogenic strain that had GmrSD, a modification-dependent restriction enzyme, introduced. If GmrSD provides defense against a phage, we expect that strain to grow. 6/

What if we dug into a sample a little more “wild” and a little less characterized? We combined our strains with a wastewater sample (thank you citizens of Boston for your ~contributions~), and again we found fluorescent hits! Each was isolated and characteristics confirmed on monoculture lawns. 5/

Phage DisCo can be further multiplexed with three bacterial strains in co-culture, and, when tested with characterized phages, the fluorescent signal shined! Maybe you can see where the disco ball comparison comes in here. 🪩 4/