Elle Barnes

“Our genes changed when we started to tangle with yeast and lactic acid bacteria, and theirs didn't. And so from the standard storytelling, we would say, well, they domesticated us.” -Dr. Rob Dunn

For thousands of years, humans have harnessed microbes to ferment beer and bread. But ecologist Rob Dunn asks: Who’s really in charge of this relationship?

buff.ly/BZyFzN6

🌍 Languages of Life | Línguas da Vida | Bahasa Kehidupan 🗣️🌱

Biodiversity doesn’t speak only English. 🌳🐒
If species cross borders, our words should too.
New paper in @ConLetters : why saving life also means using more languages

🔗https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/conl.13139

Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment.

The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP

jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/

Image shows a wheel with colourful wedges. The wedges are marked with words like 'sustainability', 'wellbeing' and 'policy'

An update to the Zoo Sphere of Influence model was recently published in the Biological Conservation journal (tinyurl.com/zoosphere)

This model, first conceived in 2023, originally set out to replace the 50-year-old perception of zoos and aquariums...

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My amazing @ritscience.bsky.social student, Emma, attended Princeton EEB scholars program last week. So proud of her! She is looking for #PhD programs this cycle so if you are looking for a student that can bridge field, lab, and computational biology… she is the PERFECT person for your lab! 👩🏼‍🔬🧬✨

Come join us as we plan for the Global Amphibian & Reptile Disease Conference 2026! 🐸🐍🐢🦎🦠🌎

📖Published📖

Neshat et al. introduce MicroEcoTools, an R package designed to test ecological framework predictions using microbial community data 🦠 🌎 🧪

Read the article here 👇

buff.ly/sXnPdhO

Bacteria poison and eat their neighbors Bacteria leverage a secretion system to kill and scavenge nutrients from nearby competitors

It’s a bacterium-eats-bacterium world…

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

30+ dead turtles alongside NY Highway 90 killed by cars as they try to cross from @deptfishwildlife.bsky.social Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge 🤬😭 @governor.ny.gov we need wildlife crossings! @dec.ny.gov

Image showing experimental design with map of Washington state showing increased precipitation from west to east. Soil was collected from field sites along this gradient and transplanted to the greenhouse where Camelina was grown in the soil under controlled conditions and their microbiome identified.

Another project from my time @jgi.doe.gov published @phytobiomesjournal.bsky.social ! Using a greenhouse soil transplant experiment we uncover the core microbiome of Camelina & show how past cropping regimes/precipitation can exert a legacy effect on microbiome assembly 🌾🦠🧬🧪
doi.org/10.1094/PBIO...

URGENT: The scientists' letter must be signed before May 19, when comments close. 🌎

Virtual Rally to Save the Cornerstone of Conservation Science · National Wildlife Federation We need YOU as we rally in support of _critical_ federal government services at risk of being lost forever. The U.S. Geological Survey Ecosystems Mission Area is responsible for many of the programs t...

Professors at USGS coop units were absolutely critical parts of my education at 3 different universities. They're probably affiliated with more useful conservation research than any other agency on earth. Join the rally to defend science next week!

🌎🐟🦉🐍🦊🌿🧪 #hydrology #Invert mobilize.us/s/JyAqUI

Student holding giant card signed by lab members

Student presenting masters thesis called “environmental factors that influence the amphibian microbiome”

Students sampling wild amphibians in the field

In happier news: the MEGA Lab @rittigers.bsky.social celebrated the successful defense of our first MS student! ✨ @trminahan.bsky.social did an amazing job summarizing the last two years of research on salamander microbiomes. It is a MASSIVE dataset! Stay tuned for our preprint this summer 🐸🧬🧫🦠🌎

Two circular hard enamel pin badges that say "it's Dr, actually". One has a trans flag design and one has a non-binary flag design

Getting a doctorate is hard work and it absolutely sucks when people swap out that hard-won gender-neutral expert title for something that both ignores your expertise and dismisses your gender. Apparently I'm not the only one who feels like this because you bought enough pins for me to make more!

Important 🧵 if your research depends on genome assemblies from long (PacBio / ONT) reads. As @merenbey.bsky.social says, these may not be the genomes you are looking for. TLDR: the assemblers are wrong and predict too many small circular contigs.

Students teaching the public about salamanders

Person dressed in salamander costume

Person posing with giant salamander cut out

Bacteria art using bacteria isolated from salamander skin

Our lab had a great time at our first #ImagineRIT event this weekend. Students talked to 500+ members of the public about their research in microbial ecology & genomics, and gave away lots of salamander swag! 🐸🧬👩🏼‍🔬👨🏻‍🔬🧪🌎🔬 @rittigers.bsky.social

Mixing microbiomes in vitro reveals rules of community assembly | PNAS Mixing microbiomes in vitro reveals rules of community assembly

Our commentary on the elegant in vitro microbiome coalescence experiments from @goldmandoran.bsky.social @ksxue.bsky.social et al is out.

It was a pleasure to write about one of my favorite microbiome papers of the last few years.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Picture of spotted salamander in leaf litter

Picture of spotted salamander in someone’s hands

Happy salamander season to all who celebrate ✨🌈

Amazing postdoc opportunity! Fletcher is a great mentor and wonderful human! Plus, Oregon is pretty darn beautiful.

Environment‐Organism Feedbacks Drive Changes in Ecological Interactions Ecological interactions are central to our understanding of the composition and function of communities, but attempts to use them as a theoretical foundation for experimental ecology have been confou....

Our framework explaining why ecological interactions change between contexts is out in Ecology Letters!
A lovely collaboration with @saramitri.bsky.social which provides experimentally-testable links between the physiology and ecology of microbes.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Post-Doc position in the KZLab! Immune responses to pathogen infections in frogs We are looking for an NSF-funded post-doc in our lab in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. The work will examine immune mechanisms that potentially underlie…

Hey All, plz repost, and share with grads, post-docs and disease folks! We are hiring a post-doc to work on mechanisms of immune responses of frog hosts to Bd infections. Deadline is February 1, 2025. Details for the position can be found at the link below. 🐸🐸🐸

zamudiolab.org/2024/12/17/p...

A ‘Second Tree of Life’ Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn (Gift Article) Research on so-called mirror cells, which defy fundamental properties of living organisms, should be prohibited as too dangerous, biologists said.

Over 30 prominent scientists call for a ban on the creation of a "mirror cell"--a microbe made of molecules that are mirror images of their natural forms. It could cause a mind-boggling global disaster. Here's my story [gift link] 🧪https://nyti.ms/3OUCXp6

Diverse phage communities are maintained stably on a clonal bacterial host Bacteriophages are the most abundant and phylogenetically diverse biological entities on Earth, yet the ecological mechanisms that sustain this extraordinary diversity remain unclear. In this study, w...

Is it “winner-takes all” when the simplest living things compete? Check out my fresh publication on phage coexistence in Science and a thread below🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

YouTube video by Nature on PBS Frogs Are Going Extinct – Here's How We Can Save Them | WILD HOPE

So grateful to @hhmi.bsky.social for this @pbs.org 15 min documentary about our Amphibian Rescue project - more than a million views 👏🏼🐸❤️ m.youtube.com/watch?v=WXK6...

Disentangling the impact of environmental and phylogenetic constraints on prokaryotic within-species diversity AbstractMicrobial organisms inhabit virtually all environments and encompass a vast biological diversity. The pangenome concept aims to facilitate an under

"Disentangling the impact of environmental and phylogenetic constraints on prokaryotic within-species diversity" by @omaistrenko.bsky.social (2020) investigated which factors contribute to pangenome size – e.g. it's higher in soil and lower in host-associated habitats

academic.oup.com/ism...

Bacterial community function increases leaf growth in a pitcher plant experimental system

#mSystems by @jess-bernardin.bsky.social et al

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

Hmmm not sure if I know of any datasets that sampled both cultivated (though not sure if @jwoodelius.bsky.social explicitly means farmed or just generally managed) & uncultivated sections of the same park, but sounds like a cool idea!

Hello CNY Microbiology (and beyond!) friends! I am organizing a KBase bioinformatics workshop at SUNY ESF on December 11. This event is open to all our friends in the region and has a Zoom option. Please reach out if you have any questions!

Register here: forms.gle/qkifXoMSH2uN...

The strain on scientific publishing: we set out to characterise the remarkable growth of the scientific literature in the last few years, in spite of declining growth in total scientists. What is going on?

direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

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#AcademicSky #PhDchat #ScientificPublishing #SciPub