Chris Mancuso

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A new study by @mancusosci.bsky.social and @contaminatedsci.bsky.social shows that intraspecies microbial conflict can block new strains from settling in. If we want long-lasting probiotics, we must account for battles within species, not just between them. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to see our work out in Nature Micro today! Big thanks to everyone involved in seeing it over the finish line!

The microbiome of the human facial skin is unique compared to that of other hominids | mSystems Understanding how and why human skin bacteria differ from our closest animal relatives provides crucial insights into human evolution and health. While we have known that human facial skin hosts disti...

Our work on the facial skin microbiome of non-human primates is out in mSystems!

We show there is no close relative of Cutibacterium on the faces of gorillas and chimps at the Lincoln Park Zoo, furthering the mysterious origin of the dominant human skin colonizer.

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Modeling predicts that metabolic diversity increases the ecological impacts of weapon gene transfer. Modeling scenarios for each column are shown across the top row. Bottom row: Example dynamics of the strains (attacker, target, transconjugant) during a contest using parameters that correspond to the cross (X) shown in the parameter sweeps directly below.

#Bacteria use weapons to outcompete rivals, but what happens if they're transferred? @prokaryota.bsky.social @jdpal.bsky.social &co show that HGT of toxin #plasmids is rare but recipients can thrive under relaxed nutrient competition, reshaping bacterial warfare @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/43vC3X7

Do people in the same household share strains when they have the same species?

How many cells transmit when a strain is shared?
Can strain composition be dynamic when species composition is stable?

We answer these and related questions for the facial skin microbiome in our latest paper.

🧵[1/10]

Bacteriocin production facilitates nosocomial emergence of vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium - Nature Microbiology Genomic and functional analyses of healthcare-associated vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium reveal that bacteriocin T8 is enriched in emergent lineages and provides a competitive advantage in v...

Excited to share our latest, out today in @naturemicrobiol.bsky.social Bacteriocin production facilitates nosocomial emergence of vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium www.nature.com/articles/s41... @idpittstop.bsky.social

Long letter from NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, available here: https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/Letter-to-the-Community.pdf

🧪 The NSF director is lying to you.

Let’s fact check 7 claims from yesterday’s letter to the community, while pointing out 3 critical omissions. 🧵

Edited for brevity: I expect the professional society that I have supported with national & regional membership dues, conference fees for myself and mentees, journal publication fees, & my time as an editor and reviewer, to support widely held values & to advocate on behalf of ALL microbiologists, 🧵

My letter to ASM leaders that I sent is too long to be posted here, so I'm going to post highlights in case anyone else needs information for their letter. 🧵

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...

Prediction of strain level phage–host interactions across the Escherichia genus using only genomic information - Nature Microbiology Phage–host interactions are computationally predicted using only genomic information, highlighting future research directions and enabling generation of custom phage cocktails.

Out in Nature Microbiology, we predicted phage-bacteria interactions in E. coli species using only genomic information.

Adsorption, not defense systems, is the main driver at this scale (relevant for a phage therapy context), leading to tailored cocktails!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧵👇

Panel A from figure 1 of the preprint showing the strains and asobiotics used, as well as the in-vitro laboratory evolution assay

We used in-vitro laboratory evolution to "stress test" the next generation class of antibiotics based on antisense oligos ("asobiotics"). Head over to our new preprint to find out more!

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

Want to make beautiful scientific figures? Easy!

The NIH released a library of 2000+ free scientific illustrations called *BioArt*.

Check it out! bioart.niaid.nih.gov

#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky 🧠🟦 🧪

Voters are advised to return their ballots early because of mail delay concerns Election officials are raising concerns about the U.S. Postal Service's ability to handle this fall’s expected influx of election mail. But USPS say it’s ready to deliver the country’s ballots.

Dear mail-in voters,

If your state's return deadline is Election Day (Nov. 5), the U.S. Postal Service recommends that you mail your ballot by Tuesday (Oct. 29).

Sincerely,
The reporter who wrote this:
www.npr.org/2024/09/20/n...

Intraspecies warfare restricts strain coexistence in human skin microbiomes Determining why only a fraction of encountered or applied bacterial strains engraft in a given person’s microbiome is crucial for understanding and engineering these communities[1][1]. Previous work h...

see preprint for more: doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Petri plate photo which shows an array of bacteria inhibiting eachother's growth

Given the recent X-odus, I'll reintroduce my postdoc research:

Commensal skin bacteria not only attack pathogens, but also fight among themselves! This intraspecies (& interspecies) warfare not only limits which strains can coexist on each person, it also makes cool-looking petri dishes 😎

2 liters of sweat solution in a large beaker in a laboratory.

Being a postdoc is strange. One day you're writing a faculty applications highlighting your unique and valuable skillset, the next you're making 2L of 8x concentrated artificial sweat...

We are on the look out for postdocs to join the Lieberman Lab at MIT. Areas include:

-Connecting bacterial warfare to strain dynamics in vivo

-Evolution and transmission of microbes in humans

-Revisiting role of microbes in acne vulgaris

Take a look at our recent preprints and reach out!

Those of you at SMBE, check out Poster #86 on Tuesday by grad student Evan Qu: "Phylogeny-aware strain profiling limits false positive detections and quantifies divergence time of novel strains"

Lots of amazing EEB sessions at #ASMicrobe, but consider stopping by B312 at 315 to see how ecoevo dynamics and antagonism play out for S epi living on people!

Chris Mancuso @mancusosci.bsky.social will be sharing our story in bacterial antagonisms on Sunday at 3:15p in the session on Integrating in silico models in host-microbe biology.

Check it out for more antagonism goodness ! #ASMicrobe

This is amazing! I was just brainstorming with a labmate about modeling hgt-environment-antagonism tradeoffs, so glad you tackled it already! Really curious whether your results can help resolve debate re:similarities/differences between host associated bugs (Staphs) and environmental bugs (Vibrios)

Thanks for the link, sorry I missed this one! Nice evidence pointing to anti-aureus activity. Love that you examined ZOI size rather than just binary data, feel like these types of data are often underutilized!

In addition to Jacob, I want to thank Evan Qu, Delphine Tripp, and Ishaq Balogun for all their help on this project. And of course Tami Lieberman (@contaminatedsci.bsky.social) for guiding us all along the way! 12/12

Highly-resolved within-species dynamics in the human facial skin microbiome bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

This work would not have been possible without the amazing strain collection and analyses described in Jacob Baker‘s (@microjacob.bsky.social) recent preprint. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cartoon depicting tradeoff between phage and antimicrobials

So, as you might have guessed, the culprit may be phage! Mutants were protected from phage at the cost of sensitivity to antimicrobials. This underscores the sheer number of lethal selection pressures that skin microbes must adapt to. 10/12

Bar graph showing mutants are more sensitive to antimicrobials

We thought this might be on-person evolution of resistance, but the phylogeny suggested the opposite! So why would strains evolve sensitivity to antimicrobials? We identified parallel mutations in the vraFG complex, which regulates cell surface modifications. 9/12

Heat map with two samples highlighted that differ from the rest

For most S. epidermidis lineages, we saw no variation in production or sensitivity across the lineage. On these subjects however, we found two lineages with differences in sensitivity to antimicrobials. In fact, the exact same pattern of sensitivity… 8/12

Of course, no rule is without exceptions. We looked into the few adult subjects who appeared to have antagonism between co-existing strains. Turns out, there’s more going on here… 7/12

Plot of antagonism frequency vs subject. Most samples show zero antagonism

Strains that co-reside on the same person tend not to antagonize each other, suggesting possible exclusion of sensitive strains by antagonists. In fact, MOST people have ZERO on-person warfare, despite living with family members that have antagonistic or sensitive strains. 6/12