Boris Taillefer

So -- What are Ralstonia and why are they goopy?

Ralstonia are bacterial pathogens of plants. They colonize and clog the water-transporting xylem vessels, causing rapid-onset wilt disease—they can fatally wilt plants within days.

This timelapse by Jonathan Jacobs shows a sped-up time-course.

This is the end of my journey at @irhs-angers.bsky.social as a post-doc 🎓 Thank you so much @emersys-irhs.bsky.social for hosting me during the two last years and helping me to develop more🔬 Scientific products of our projects on the T6SS biology of Stenotrophomonas rhizophila are coming 👀

Check our new perspective paper exploring how the seed holobiont goes to sleep 😴 and reactivate for germination.
A lot of exciting research to be done to understand dormancy mechanisms in microbes and plants ☘️
@emersys-irhs.bsky.social @irhs-angers.bsky.social

Disruption of putrescine export in experimentally evolved Ralstonia pseudosolanacearum enhances symbiosis with Mimosa pudica | mBio Rhizobia, the nitrogen-fixing symbionts of legumes, emerged through repeated and independent horizontal transfers of some essential symbiotic genes. However, these transfers alone are often insufficie...

This paper solves the puzzle that I wrote about in my chapter 5 / future directions of my PhD thesis!

It's really interesting what comes out of these in planta experimental evolution studies

journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

A commensal bacterium secretes effector proteins to establish population heterogeneity in the gut Zagieboylo and colleagues demonstrate that the human commensal Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron secretes two self-targeting proteins that induce heterogeneity within its own population. Differential expre...

An unexpected mechanism for population heterogeneity in the gut microbiome:

www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Time-resolved bottleneck analysis in bacterial infection dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.21.689558v1