Laura Suttenfield

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...

Congratulations! 🎉☺️

Clustering of plasmid genomes for genomic epidemiology by using rearrangement distances, with pling Integration of plasmids into genomic epidemiology is challenging, because there are no clearly defined evolving-units (equivalent to species), and because plasmids appear to evolve as much by structur...

For anyone who has used pling for comparing plasmids using rearrangement distances ("how many structural events apart are these plasmids"), here's how to tweak parameters, and integrate it with typing info, and the host phylogeny
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
github.com/iqbal-lab-or...

Genomic resistance in historical clinical isolates increased in frequency and mobility after the age of antibiotics Antibiotic resistance is frequently observed shortly after the clinical introduction of an antibiotic. Whether and how frequently that resistance occurred before the introduction is harder to determin...

What was antibiotic resistance like before we ever used antibiotics? How did we change what antibiotic resistance genes looked like over 100 years?

Our paper looking at resistance genes from a century of NCTC historical isolates now out in mGen:
www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

Species interactions determine plasmid persistence in a 3-member bacterial community Microbial communities are shaped by complex forces, including interspecies interactions and the effects of mobile genetic elements such as plasmids. How these forces interact to affect community respo...

Plasmids can be lost from a bacterial community even under positive environmental selection: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Super excited to read! Congrats on getting this out!

Pioneer of bacterial genetics: the legacy of Esther Miriam Lederberg Abstract. Esther Miriam Lederberg's brilliant scientific lifework, from the discovery of phage lambda, bacterial conjugation, and replica plating, provided

An inspiring read!
academic.oup.com/genetics/adv...
A beautiful historical perspective on Ester Lederberg's legacy from @ccwendling.bsky.social & @zacharybailey.bsky.social

Genomic constraints shape the evolution of alternative routes to drug resistance in prokaryotes Background Variation within the prokaryotic pangenome is not random, and natural selection that favours particular combinations of genes appears to dominate over random drift. What is less clear is wh...

New preprint reveals bacteria can't just collect all resistance genes like Pokemon cards.
We found mutually exclusive evolutionary pathways to multidrug resistance in E. coli & P. aeruginosa - some resistance mechanisms actively prevent others from coexisting www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Impulse or a very fast yet brilliant decision?

Our EEB department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is hiring an assistant professor in evo-devo. See go.illinois.edu/EEBAsstProf for details. Please share!

Check out our new paper led by brilliant @jhuisman.bsky.social about how microbial communities cope with stress due to increasing salinity in their environment. We have all your favorites: isolate phenotyping, pairwise competitions, community propagations, and theory. #microsky #mevosky #ecosky

The Weisberg Lab at Oregon State University is recruiting a postdoctoral scholar in molecular microbiology to study mobile genetic element host range and transmission in microbial communities. Please see the full job description here: files-dev.cqls.oregonstate.edu/Weisberg_Lab...

Congratulations, so cool to see this out :)