Samay Pande

📢 Postdoc position: Cell Biology of Cyanobacteria

in my group, as part of the Excellence Cluster "Microbes for Climate" (M4C) in Marburg, Germany.

More information at shorturl.at/wNnDT (see Project 2)

🔗Apply at shorturl.at/VsEDl
📅Deadline: Nov 16, 2025

Please repost. #Postdoc

Plasmid dependent phage eliminate pathogenic bacteria and antibiotic resistance plasmids from the chicken gut microbiome Conjugative plasmids are a key reservoir of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in commensal and pathogenic bacteria within the gut microbiome. Plasmid-dependent phage (PDPs) are a promising therapeutic op...

New pre-print: Plasmid dependent phage effectively eliminate AMR bacteria and block plasmid transmission in the chicken gut microbiome

Fun collaboration with Tao He lab (JAAS) and @brockhurstlab.bsky.social lab (Manchester)
#phagesky#microsky

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

Learn how Bacillus siderophore benefit various plant species and the role of the biofilm matrix: our collaboration with Zhihui Xu's group published in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social

Siderophore-mediated iron enrichment in the biofilm matrix enhances plant iron nutrition

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Who would have thought: nitrogen-fixing vibrios 😱 that interact with Pokkali rice roots and promote plant growth in brackish water. Amazing! Wonderful to see this detailed and careful investigation out for all to oogle. Many congratulations Ramesh 🎉

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

Genome-wide screen to identify Escherichia coli gene knockouts hypersensitive to trimethoprim and chloramphenicol. Top left: Schematic showing the screening strategy for identifying hypersensitive gene knockouts from the Keio mutant library. All mutants were cultured in LB and LB supplemented with trimethoprim (TMP) and chloramphenicol (CMP) at their respective IC50s. Top right: Distribution of drug-susceptibilities of Keio mutants grown in indicated growth media obtained after normalizing the growth of each mutant to wild type (set to 1). Mean ± S.D. derived after fitting each distribution to a Gaussian function are shown. Bottom left: Analysis of gene functional categories for hypersensitive mutants compared with the frequency of genes in each category encoded by E. coli K-12 MG1655. Percentage of the total in each case is provided above each bar. Bottom right: Comparison of hypersensitive mutants identified in the trimethoprim and chloramphenicol screens shown as a Venn diagram. Representative genes from each set are named and gene names are colored by functional categories.

Intrinsic resistance pathways & #ResistanceBreaking. Study shows that inhibiting efflux pumps & cell envelope biogenesis sensitizes #bacteria to #antibiotics, but rapid evolutionary recovery may limit long-term effectiveness of resistance-breaking strategies #AMR @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4huAtvo

Multiple small, curved, predatory bacteria (Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus) lyse the bacterial prey remnants below. How are they doing this & which predator proteins are involved in this process?

See our newly released research article 📑
=> rdcu.be/eL6gu

🦠 #microsky #bacteria #PredatoryBacteria

Non-conjugative plasmids limit their mobility to persist in nature Sabnis et al. explain why non-conjugative plasmids move at a low rate in nature. While increased mobility can easily evolve by incorporating phage DNA into plasmids, this is disadvantageous because it...

New paper with my (amazing) friend and mentor @jrpenades.bsky.social
Really looking forward to see what plasmid aficionados think of this one!!
With @asantoslopez.bsky.social @wfigueroac3.bsky.social Akshay Sabins and others
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Evolution of One Species Increases Resistance to Invasion in a Simple Synthetic Community - Microbial Ecology The species that make up a microbial community determine its potential function. A major goal of microbial ecology is to make assemblages of microbes — synthetic communities — with targeted applicatio...

Evolution of One Species Increases Resistance to Invasion in a Simple Synthetic Community

Microbial Ecology

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Strong promoters are mutationally robust Mutational robustness is the persistence of a phenotype upon mutation. It facilitates molecular evolution and has been characterized in a variety of biological systems, but studies of prokaryotic prom...

A fun little side project I've been working on with @stepadenisov.bsky.social , Mato Lagator, and Andreas Wagner: "Strong promoters are mutationally robust". Briefly...

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

#microsky #mevosky @spp2389.bsky.social

A PhD position is available in my lab to work on:

Emergence and self-organisation of bacterial metabolism in consortia of cross-feeding bacteria.

Please RT

Deadline: 12.11.25

More infos 👇
shorturl.at/rAKAT

Big thanks to Rekha (lead), an absolute rockstar who drove the project, and Jyotsna for pushing this work forward!
Also grateful to our collaborator Prof. Siva Umapathy for the Raman spectroscopy expertise.

This is one of the first demonstrations linking biochemical markers of spores to their germination efficiency, using a non-invasive, label-free approach.

Most excitingly, these Raman spectral features of mature spores correlated strongly with germination efficiency across natural soil isolates of M. xanthus.

Meaning: Raman spectra can serve as predictive markers of germination success.

We found that:
1. Lipid and protein signatures shift dynamically during sporulation
2. Carotenoids accumulate in spores (stress protection!)
3. Nucleic acid signatures become compacted

Using single-cell Raman spectroscopy, we tracked key biochemical changes (lipids, proteins, nucleic acids, carotenoids) as M. xanthus transitioned from vegetative cells into spores.

Dormancy is one of the most widespread microbial survival strategies — from spores to persisters to VBNCs. But how do we predict which spores will successfully germinate and “wake up” again?

Raman Spectral Predictors of Spore Germination Efficiency in Natural Isolates of Myxococcus xanthus Due to the prevalence and importance of dormant microbial forms in regulating microbial ecosystems, the generation of dormant structures, like spores, has been extensively studied. However, several aspects of the exit of bacterial spores from dormancy, i.e., the germination of spores, remain relatively unclear. Since the biology of cells before transitioning into spores and the biology of the spores themselves could potentially influence the germination process, we used Myxococcus xanthus as a model organism to demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy can be used to characterize the factors that affect the ability of individual cells and spores to sporulate and germinate, respectively. M. xanthus is a Gram-negative soil bacterium that forms spore-filled multicellular fruiting bodies upon starvation. Single-cell Raman spectral profiling revealed lower Raman peak intensities of nucleic acids as a marker for the beginning of sporulation. Moreover, Raman profiles of sporulating cells of M. xanthus demonstrated that the lipid peaks increased during the initial sporulation phase before decreasing during the late sporulation phase. We also observed higher carotenoid peaks in spores than in cells, which might explain the reason for spores being more tolerant to oxidative stress than the cells. Significantly, the trends in Raman bands of nucleic acids and proteins observed in the lab strain were also observed in the natural isolates. Furthermore, partial least squares regression (PLSR) analysis of peak intensities of the most significantly affected chemical groups demonstrated a strong correlation between Raman spectra and germination efficiencies of spores, suggesting that such spectral markers are potential indicators of the germination efficiency of the spore population.

New paper out in @pubs.acs.org Analytical Chemistry!
We show that Raman spectroscopy can identify biochemical signatures of spores in Myxococcus xanthus, and that these signatures can predict germination efficiency across natural isolates.
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Not many positions offer this rare combination: exciting research questions, a highly supportive work atmosphere, and an exceptional mentor
@KostChristian
. If you’re in theoretical biology and want to collaborate closely with experimentalists, this is it!

Congrats Glen. This sounds interesting. Look forward to reading it.

Antagonism as a foraging strategy in microbial communities In natural habitats, nutrient availability limits bacterial growth. We discovered that bacteria can overcome this limitation by acquiring nutrients by lysing neighboring cells through contact-dependen...

Thrilled to share our new paper in @science.org describing our discovery that bacteria can switch from competitors to bonafide predators when resources run dry—arming nanoscale “spears” (T6SS) to stab & consume neighbours.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#MicroSKy #Microbiology

Big kudos to @sahelis.bsky.social , Sneha, and @vaibhav-sharma.bsky.social ! Stay tuned for more stories on how microbial predation affects the evolution of resistance in pristine environments.

Thus, microbial interactions in pristine environments can influence the evolvability of pathogens long before clinical antibiotic exposure.

These findings are important because: Resistance traits arising under biotic stress may be less constrained, and potentially more evolutionarily potent, than those shaped in antibiotic-only settings.

Our work demonstrates that coevolutionary history with a predator influences not only present-day survival but also the trajectory, speed, and cost of future adaptations, such as antibiotic resistance.

While abiotic influences on evolvability have been widely studied, the historical contingencies of antagonisms, such as microbial predation, remain underexplored.

Anti-predatory adaptations in E. coli were retained even after propagation in predator-free environments. These historical imprints persist and affect future evolutionary responses.

And yet, if resistance does evolve in predator-adapted prey, it comes at a lower fitness cost than in other backgrounds. This means such resistance may spread faster in microbial populations.

Key finding: Predation history restricts the evolution of high-level antibiotic resistance in prey bacteria, compared to those evolved only under abiotic conditions or wild-type controls.

We show that E. coli strains previously exposed to M. xanthus showed altered survivability when challenged with increasing concentrations of antibiotics.

Coevolutionary history of predation constrains the evolvability of antibiotic resistance in prey bacteria - npj Antimicrobials and Resistance npj Antimicrobials and Resistance - Coevolutionary history of predation constrains the evolvability of antibiotic resistance in prey bacteria

New paper alert!
We show that adaptation to the bacterial predator Myxococcus xanthus shapes how prey bacteria like E. coli evolve antibiotic resistance.
Now online at NPJ Antimicrobials and Resistance !!
www.nature.com/articles/s44...