5/5 New tools help to close this gap. Individual-based models, microfluidics, hydrogels, and spatial omics allow insights into spatially structured communities. Spatial complexity is not noise; it is a signal! Embracing it is how we will learn the rules that govern microbial life.🔬
12.02.2026 15:46 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
4/5 Microscale interactions scale up to shape global biogeochemical cycles. Carbon flux, nutrient cycling, and viral lysis all depend on local spatial structure that many models simply average away. Connecting micro to macro is one of the biggest open challenges in the field!
12.02.2026 15:46 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
3/5 Natural microbiomes are fragmented: across soil pores, gut crypts, and marine particles. Subpopulations are dominated by drift and limited dispersal, which stabilizes cooperation and maintains diversity. Their tiny interactions scale up to biogeochemical processes, such as the ocean carbon flux.
12.02.2026 15:46 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
2/5 In biofilms, aggregates, and colonies on agar plates, internal gradients generate distinct metabolic subpopulations. Expansion into unoccupied space promotes stochasticity and shapes HGT. Even antibiotic resistance is spatial: beta-lactamases famously protect sensitive cells nearby.
12.02.2026 15:46 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
1/5 Microbial interactions happen over surprisingly short distances. Rapid metabolite uptake creates steep gradients that limit interaction ranges to just a few cell lengths. This shapes cross-feeding, quorum sensing, and Black Queen dynamics. Spatial range determines who interacts with whom.
12.02.2026 15:46 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities
Spatial structure naturally emerges in microbial communities, shaping growth, interactions, and evolution, and revealing how microscale processes scale up
Most microbes don't live in shaking flasks; spatial structure shapes how microbes interact and evolve at every scale, as we discuss in our recent review @jeroenmeijer.bsky.social @simonvanvliet.bsky.social @bedutilh.bsky.social @bramvandijk.bsky.social and others
academic.oup.com/femsre/artic... 🧵👇
12.02.2026 15:46 — 👍 37 🔁 16 💬 2 📌 3
Spatial structure: shaping the ecology and evolution of microbial communities
Spatial structure naturally emerges in microbial communities, shaping growth, interactions, and evolution, and revealing how microscale processes scale up
Wrapping up a productive week: very glad to have contributed to this review on how spatial structure shapes microbial ecology and evolution, led by @marcelbaecker.bsky.social, @bedutilh.bsky.social, @bramvandijk.bsky.social and many others. doi.org/10.1093/fems...
11.02.2026 15:46 — 👍 39 🔁 15 💬 3 📌 2
Great seminar last week at the @jsmc-info.bsky.social, organized by @marcelbaecker.bsky.social!
Prof. Christian Kost (@kostchristian.bsky.social) shared fascinating insights into microbial interactions and cooperation.
Always inspiring to learn from leading researchers in the field
#JSMC
17.11.2025 06:58 — 👍 8 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
Assistant Professor #newPI, Texas State University. Microbial EcoEvo ◊ Astrobio ◊ ‘Omics. Interested in unraveling Earth-life coevolution. https://sobollab.wp.txstate.edu/
🌎🔭🧬🦠🧫
Computational microbiologist. Senior scientist at @cemess.bsky.social, @univie.ac.at.
Microbial ecology, mostly of nitrogen cycle microbes, and data driven physiology.
Maintainer of the GlobDB genome database https://globdb.org
How does conflict beget cooperation? All about microbes and evolution. He/him- but more a plant with human-readable emotions
Geo-Biosphere Interactions (Prof @uni_tue: biogeochemist, microbial/soil ecologist): curious about biota driving element cycles and geo-bio-systems' trajectories - from single cell metabolism to global scale
Tenured scientist @INRIA, Lyon. Studying how microbes evolve new stuff with computer simulations.
Career Development Research Fellow at St John's College, University of Oxford.
Evolution, comparative genomics, cooperation, horizontal gene transfer, plasmids.
https://www.anna-dewar.com/
Bridgy Fed (https://fed.brid.gy/) bot user for the fediverse. To bridge your Bluesky account to the fediverse, follow this account.
To ask a fediverse user to bridge their account, send their address (eg @user@instance) to this account in a chat message.…
Postdoctoral researcher
University of Zurich
Kümmerli Lab
Microbiology, ecology, and evolution
Microbiologist |microbial ecology | microbiome | phage-bacteria interactions
phages rule the world👀
Postdoc at Evolutionary Biology lab, Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine - Oeiras
Assistant Professor at UNC Chapel Hill
Msc Marine Microbiology @ MPI Bremen.
Love the ocean, molecular biology, microbial ecology and natural history, also an avid ant fan :) 🏔️🦕🦠🌿🌊🐜🦣
Assistant professor at Utrecht University (Theoretical Biology). Simulating microbes, mobile elements, horizontal gene transfer, and whatever else happens on a grain of sand | 🏳️🌈 | he / they | thevirtuallaboratory.com
Postdoc @ DOE JGI Berkeley Lab 🇺🇸 | Former PhD Student @ Flinders University 🇦🇺 | #bioinformatics #viruses #AI 🦠💻🧬 | she/her
https://github.com/susiegriggo
PhD candidate in Viral Ecology and Omics Group
Friedrich Schiller University, Jena
Hi!
I'm Marion, a PhD student in the Barber lab at the University of Jena. I am interested in human pathogenic fungi, pangenomics, transcriptomics, and a sprinkle of evolution. Also fascinated about astrobiology ✨
Our mission is to explore and understand the world of
microbial communities in the #environment. https://geomicrobiology.uni-jena.de
Postdoctoral at Fungal Informatics FSU
Jena, Germany
Located at the University of California-Berkeley at the Innovative Genomics Institute.
Purveyors of Microbial Ecology, Bioinformatics, & Nanogeoscience.
Reposts or likes≠endorsements.
https://www.banfieldlab.com/
Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Evolutionary Microbiology
@UniCologne & @CEPLAS_1, studying how fungi interact with plants and their environment. He/him. 💛🖤
