Megan Behringer

Danone North America Invests in the Future of Microbiome Science with 2024-2025 Fellowship Awards /PRNewswire/ -- Danone North America, a leading purpose-driven food and beverage company and one of the world's largest Certified B Corporations®, is proud to...

Really proud of Owen Hale, a Ph.D. Candidate in our group who was awarded the Gut Microbiome, Yogurt and Probiotic Fellowship by Danone North America.

Owen’s research focuses on E. coli / Lactic Acid Bacteria interactions!

www.prnewswire.com/news-release...

Microbial cross-feeding stabilized by segregation of a dependent mutant from its independent ancestor Abstract. Microbial gene loss is hypothesized to be beneficial when gene function is costly, and the gene product can be replaced via cross-feeding from a

Microbial cross-feeding stabilized by segregation of a dependent mutant from its independent ancestor

#ISMEJournal by @ofsheff.bsky.social et al from @jakemckinlay.bsky.social

academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

Carl is an awesome science communicator. He’s finishing up his PhD focused on bacterial epigenetics and evolution. He’s a rockstar at applying Bayesian statistical approaches to large omics datasets!

Really proud of PhD Candidate Carl Stone, advocating for science and scientific funding by wiring this opinion piece for his hometown newspaper in Minnesota.

An Anaerobic Pathogen Rewires Host Metabolism to Fuel Oxidative Growth in the Inflamed Gut https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.31.657111v1

Truly awful. I’m so sorry you and your lab are getting targeted by all this.

Given that there are 435 voting members of Congress, I would have hoped for more than 25% of House members to support American innovation in science and technology. 112? That’s it? No one else wants answers?!?!

Starvation drives co-existence in cross-feeding bacterial populations Cross-feeding is a universal feature of natural microbial communities that extends even into subpopulation structures, generating cooperative ecotypes. However, we still lack an understanding of the e...

Very cool new work by @megbehri.bsky.social and William F. McLaughlin:

Starvation drives co-existence in cross-feeding bacterial populations

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

Of course! It was a fun paper to write because we got to really dig in and think about Rho (and mutations that evolve in Rho) in bacteria other than our usual E. coli! Especially, the gram positives where Rhi can have such an impact on development too!

Thanks for the Signal Boost, Ákos!

We’re so happy to see our review discussing Rho as an evolutionary capacitor out in Transcription!
It’s an exciting follow up to our recent research article & opens up a discussion of where we expect evolutionary capacitors to exist b/w the genotype/phenotype gap.

Excited to announce our latest manuscript on bioRxiv! Led by PhD student Owen Hale, we anaerobically examine the mutation rates of aerotolerant anaerobic species of Lactic Acid Bacteria: Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus crispatus, and Lactococcus lactis.

Residence Time Structures Microbial Communities Through Niche Partitioning Much of life on earth is at the mercy of currents and flow. Residence time (τ) estimates how long organisms and resources remain in a system based on the ratio of volume (V) to flow rate (Q). We test...

Congratulations to @emmiamueller.bsky.social on:

"Residence time structures microbial communities through niche partitioning"

Now out in Ecology Letters:

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

Really enjoyed visiting NC State for the Genetics and Genomics seminar yesterday! Got to chat with a great group of researchers, heard awesome science, and the food scene in Raleigh was pretty yum! 🧬🧫

I am confident that scientific societies will play an unusually important role in the coming years. If you are a microbiologist of any kind, please consider joining @asm.org if you haven't already. There are many ways to get involved, including advocacy.
To learn more:
asm.org/About-ASM/Vo...

To all the other professors who also opened their labs in the middle of COVID and are now going to go up for tenure during this mess, I see you. 🤦‍♀️

Applications are open for the Microbial Population Biology GRS and GRC!

The GRS is a fun day for grad students and postdocs to network before the full GRC starts, and is co-chaired this year by me and Laura Suttenfield

Get your applications in by Jan 15! #evosky 🦠🧪

www.grc.org/microbial-po...

Three members of a research team are pictured in a laboratory. The man on the left wears a blue button- down shirt, the woman in the center has long red hair, wearing a blue and white patterned blouse. On the right stands another woman with brown hair, wearing a tan blazer over a black top. They stand in front of lab equipment and cables.

Three members of a research team are pictured in a laboratory. The man on the left wears a blue button- down shirt, while the two women beside nim, with brown and red hair, respectively, are dressed in professional attire, smiling at the camera. Laboratory shelves with various bottles and containers are visible in the background.

Excited for the upcoming #VUEvoMag Magazine! " @megbehri.bsky.social reached out to me a few weeks after my lab opened at Vanderbilt with this interesting observation about solution pH, but wondered if there was a way we could measure pH inside cells," Bratton recalled. loom.ly/a1hXE2o

Introducing our lab’s newest Ph.D candidate William McLaughlin. William is doing an awesome microbial systems ecology project that’s already turning out some cool results. Keep an eye out for this rising star.

Lastly, we have a great press release out by Vandy’s own
Dr. Andy Flick, so share it with your friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues!

t.co/4mEDyu5R4R

And if you love this type of research, we have lots of data on deck and are always looking for postdocs!
t.co/DEj9U2ROIl

There is of course more to our story so you will need to read the paper!
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

We also found the Arg -> His (Rho R109H) substitution in nature! Particularly in species that often navigate pH fluctuations like insect gut -> human blood or sponge microbiome-> ocean.
A great example of how lab evolution can provide insight into the natural world!

Next we collaborated with @bpbratton and found that the Rho/YdcI double mutant maintains an elevated intracellular pH, which should minimize the plasticity in mutant Rho function and maintain Rho in its alternate state that’s observed in higher pH!

We then saw that every Rho mutation arose concurrently with or following a loss/disruption of function mutation in YdcI, a poorly characterized transcription factor thought to be involved with pH homeostasis.
(These substitutions helped us get a better candidate YdcI structure)

Collaborating with @MarcBoudvillain, we found that this substitution confers pH sensitive Rho activity in vitro.

Genomic analysis of E. Coli cultures evolved for 900 days in extreme feast/famine conditions revealed that 7/16 populations acquired a mutation in the Rho transcription terminator. The most common of which conferred Arg -> His at residue 109.

🚨This week in @PNASNews 🚨
Our new paper led by postdoc @sb_worthan examining a pH sensitive substitution in the Rho transcription terminator that evolved experimentally in our lab and then is found in natural populations! Thread below! 🧵
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Had a great time last night watching @NashvilleSC win with the Vanderbilt Mathematics Department.
Thanks for letting this biologist join, there’s no better way to watch a game than in the VU box! ⚽️⚓️🧑‍🏫

Another great collaboration lead by the McKinlay lab ( @jakemckinlay.bsky.social ) if you like experimental evolution, microbial crossfeeding, and investigations of the Black Queen Hypothesis, this is for you!!

We’re currently working on a framework for analyzing longitudinal rb-TnSeq which will be able to identify patterns in how different LOF mutations are associated w/ fitness throughout a starvation cycle. We’re pretty excited about its potential for understanding fitness dynamics during feast/famine!