Laura Suttenfield

This is so timely! Great resource 👍

If you're interested in using pangenome graphs for comparative genomics, check out my webinar, part of EMBL-EBI's "Concepts, methods, and resources in pangenomics" series, available on-demand: www.ebi.ac.uk/training/eve...

Phage and phage defense friends! What conferences are you attending this upcoming year?

Bacterial warfare is associated with virulence and antimicrobial resistance - Nature Communications Bacteria employ a range of competition systems that deliver toxins to inhibit competing strains. This study shows that these systems are particularly important for the ecology of virulent and antibiot...

So happy to share this! Bacteriocins were first discovered over 100 years ago, but what do they actually do? We look at >1000 bacteriocin plasmids and find links to virulence and antimicrobial resistance, and frequent bacteriocin sharing in Enterobacteriaceae.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats! 🎉

Signatures of local nitrogen adaptation in the Brachypodium distachyon root microbiome Plants associate with diverse microbiomes that impact their fitness, yet the contribution of the microbiome to plant adaptation is uncertain. As plant recruitment of its microbiome can be both highl...

My labmate @kevinricks.bsky.social and I decided to complete a side project during the last year of our doctorate programs, and I'm happy to say that it's finally been published in New Phytologist !! doi.org/10.1111/nph....

What an incredible view!!

Carbapenem-resistance oprD mutations reshape Pseudomonas aeruginosa host-pathogen interactions during infection https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.24.684370v1

what a beautiful phage! 🤩

#microsky #mevosky The UNC Chapel Hill Biology Department is hiring 2 Teaching Assistant/Associate Professors with expertise from any area of biology. Individuals with expertise in microbiology are particularly encouraged to apply. Read more and apply at unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

Microbiology Postdoctoral Position (Please re-post)

A funded postdoctoral position in Chicago will open in 2026 to study aspects of Neisseria gonorrhoeae pathogenesis, antigenic variation, genetics, or physiology.
If interested, please get in touch with Hank Seifert
h-seifert@northwestern.edu

Once you see them everywhere you can’t unsee them anywhere!

A graphic advertising phage ecology and evolution research at the University of South Carolina, showing a central image of a tide pool flanked by a photo of an agar plate containing diverse microbes and a TEM image of a virus particle.

Very happy to share that I will be starting as an Assistant Professor in the department of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina in January! My group will be working on environmental phage ecology and evolution, and I am recruiting for the upcoming year (more info below).

Resistance mutation supply modulates the benefit of CRISPR immunity against virulent phages Only a fraction of bacterial genomes encode CRISPR-Cas systems but the selective causes of this variation are unexplained. How naturally virulent bacteriophages (phages) select for CRISPR immunity has...

New preprint!

Ever wondered why only a fraction of genomes encode CRISPR immunity? 🧬 🦠

Turns out CRISPR is rarely beneficial against virulent phages, being most beneficial against those for which resistance mutations are rare!

An epic effort by Rosanna Wright

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

Disability in ecology and evolution In this TrendsTalk series 'Disability in ecology and evolution' in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, we will be hearing from people about their experiences being disabled in ecology and evolution. We a...

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

New entry into the Disability in Ecology and Evolution series in TREE featuring me :)

I have never been jealous of a Nobel prize winner before….

congrats on getting this out! ☺️🙌 so nice to see a preview this summer, looking forward to reading the paper

Published in Current Biology! P. aeruginosa can use its filamentous phage to inhibit competitors but high phage production is susceptible to cheater miniphage invasion. Subsequent phage tragedy of the commons can lower bacteria and phage fitness. Link: authors.elsevier.com/c/1lt5I3QW8S...

DYK most P. aeruginosa carry filamentous phage(s) that don't need to kill the cell to reproduce?

We 👉🏻@nanamikubota.bsky.social show that these Pf phages can go ROGUE.

"Filamentous cheater phages drive bacterial and phage populations to lower fitness"

🔗 authors.elsevier.com/c/1lt5I3QW8S...

Now published in @natcomms.nature.com 🎉

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

With Gillian Rodger, @nstoesser.bsky.social, @samlipworth.bsky.social, @stat-sarah.bsky.social, and many others!

Thrilled to share our paper that just came out in PNAS!

We asked a deceptively simple question: What happens when S. aureus adapts to vancomycin, a critical first-line antibiotic?

1/5

Delighted to see our paper studying the evolution of plasmids over the last 100 years, now out! Years of work by Adrian Cazares, also Nick Thomson @sangerinstitute.bsky.social - this version much improved over the preprint. Final version should be open access, apols.
Thread 1/n

✨Célia Souque just showcased the outcomes of the 12th Microbial Bioinformatics Hackathon at IMMEM XIV.

She brilliantly presented the first sneak-peek of PORT – Plasmid Outbreak Reporting Tool! 🧬
Looking forward to continuing this collaboration with PORT!

#IMMEM #Hackathon #Plasmids #ESGEM #ESGMAP

Does anyone know a gene in E. coli that duplicated "fairly recently", as to compare and contrast it's sequence divergence with that found in mobile elements?

#sciencesky #microsky

Willing to join us @pasteur.fr for a PhD for a project on how interactions between mobile genetic elements shape bacterial adaptation? Subject to be tailored to candidates with keen interest in evolution, genomics, computational biology, microbiology. Check www.pasteur.fr/en/education...

A One Health study of Klebsiella pneumoniae species complex plasmids shows a highly diverse and ecologically adaptable plasmidome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.14.676155v1

Global, regional, and national estimates of tuberculosis incidence averted by eliminating undernutrition in adults: a modelling study Background Current efforts to reduce global tuberculosis incidence have proved insufficient, highlighting that urgent action is needed to address underlying modifiable risk factors such as undernutrit...

So...what would happen to the global TB epidemic if we hypothetically "eliminated" undernutrition? In this preprint, we combined estimates from our new review (doi.org/10.1093/ije/...) with population-specific BMI distributions to find out...(doi.org/10.1101/2025...)

This past year, my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. On October 5th, our family will walk together as Team Kosmo at Moving Day Chicago to celebrate his strength and support everyone living with Parkinson's.

hey bluesky 👋 visa hurdles mean I’m looking for opportunities outside the US. I’m a computational biologist (bacterial + phage genomics, postdoc in Koonin’s group @ NIH). I am interested in teaming up on funding apps. reach out if this resonates!

Happy to see this paper finally out in @pnas.org!

#phage #microbiology #MicroSky #VirEvol 🦠 🧫 🔬

Gift link: www.pnas.org/eprint/YYDZ9...