Rachel M. Wheatley

🔊 Applications for the tenure-track illuminate global challenge fellowships at Queen’s are now open!
Comes with 5 years protected research time, a PhD studentship, & 60k start-up. I had one of these before getting my FLF, happy to chat to anyone interested!

www.qub.ac.uk/Research/fel...

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...

ECOSOLUTIONS DFA - Harnessing microbes and cold plasma to concentrate and destroy ‘forever chemicals’ in food associated ecosystems at University of Sheffield on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - ECOSOLUTIONS DFA - Harnessing microbes and cold plasma to concentrate and destroy ‘forever chemicals’ in food associated ecosystems at University of Sheffield, listed on Find...

I am excited to announce two PhD opportunities! Come and join our interdisciplinary team in Sheffield, UK.
- Destroying forever chemicals with microbes and cold plasma: tinyurl.com/mth8ymx5
- Learning how motile bacteria make decisions: tinyurl.com/2hmc9a8u
UK and overseas students welcome to apply!

🔊 Applications for the tenure-track illuminate global challenge fellowships at Queen’s are now open!
Comes with 5 years protected research time, a PhD studentship, & 60k start-up. I had one of these before getting my FLF, happy to chat to anyone interested!

www.qub.ac.uk/Research/fel...

Happy World Judo Day! Lots of good times and can’t wait to get stuck back in once the newborn chaos calms a bit … 🤩🥋

Congratulations!

Antibiotic Resistance and Mechanisms (ARM) Workshop for Researchers 2025 - The British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy

Join us in Birmingham for the annual BSAC #AntibioticResistance & Mechanisms workshop - excellent talks and it’s designed to make conversation & networking between attendees easy #MicroSky bsac.org.uk/antibiotic-r...

2 job adverts on a NERC project w myself + @darrenobbard.bsky.social on “What determines the virome: ecology and the environment, evolution, or species history?” early 2026 in
@uniexecec.bsky.social
- Postdoc: jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...
- RA: jobs.exeter.ac.uk/hrpr_webrecr...
Pls share!

#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

YouTube video by Milner Centre for Evolution How the Vectors of Antibiotic Resistance Have Evolved - Professor Zamin Iqbal

Podcast with me and @turiking.bsky.social for the @milnerevolution.bsky.social series, on plasmid evolution over the last 100 years, talking about our ( @cazares-adr.bsky.social , Nick Thomson, @sarah1alexander.bsky.social & co) recent paper www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
youtu.be/Mzr3TD4ijs0?...

And for all of us looking at the microbiome…. Don’t forget the viruses! ( @connorggbamford.bsky.social I know you’ll appreciate this 😆)

So enjoyable to work with both @bkoskella.bsky.social & @dholtappels.bsky.social on this project! Which started as a brilliant idea from Britt at the Wiko, and has continued remotely since (ft also a lovely trip to Berkeley!) ☺️ yay for team science!

Overall, while specific viral taxa as signatures might be limited as highly disease or condition specific, we think there is promise for the use of existing ecological theory in predicting / explaining microbiome health when considering compositional changes in the virome 🦠

We saw that the relationship between viral and bacterial alpha diversity breaks down under dysbiosis - raising the question that could this itself be a useful signature of disturbance?

What did we find? Well, changes to virome alpha diversity accompany dysbiosis around half of the time. Shifting virome composition is a more consistent signature, with significant changes to virome beta diversity accompanying dysbiosis ~70% of the time.

We did both a qualitative analysis of author-reported metrics and a quantitative analysis of changes to virome alpha diversity. We also looked at the correlation between bacterial and viral alpha diversity across “healthy” and “dysbiosis” states.

We wanted to test the ability of measurements of viral communities to reflect signatures of microbiome health - and used a large collection of previously published data where the virome had been compared between some measure of disturbance and a control group (with absence of that disturbance)

Is a healthy ecosystem one that is rich in parasites? Historically, the role of parasites in ecosystem functioning has been considered trivial because a cursory examination reveals that their relative biomass is low compared with that of other trophic gr...

Inspired by this brilliant review on the role of parasites in shaping the ecology and evolution of their hosts ….. we ask this question in the microbial world, where the primary parasites of bacteria are bacteriophage viruses

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

Is a healthy microbiome one that is rich in phages? 🦠 Excited to share our paper out in Lancet Microbe with @bkoskella.bsky.social & @dholtappels.bsky.social where we test whether virome diversity can be used a broad signature of microbiome health 📈

Three Bicentenary research fellowships on offer at @officialuom.bsky.social @fbmh-uom.bsky.social for exceptional ECRs with <3y postdoc experience

3yrs salary + £30k pa research expenses

Do you have a great idea & want to join @mermanchester.bsky.social?

www.bmh.manchester.ac.uk/research/sup...

Trade-offs between phage resistance and conjugative ability shape the ecological and evolutionary response of a multidrug resistance plasmid to plasmid-dependent phage Phage therapy is a promising alternative to antibiotics to treat multidrug resistant infections. Plasmid dependent phages (PDPs) are particularly attractive as therapeutics because they can both kill ...

New pre-print www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Plasmid-dependent phage (PDPs) are ubiquitous, but the selective pressures that they impose on plasmids are not well understood. Project led by Daniel Cazares in collaboration with @brockhurstlab.bsky.social!
#phagesky#microsky

So fun to attend the FLF starting meeting in Glasgow and meet the rest of the round 9 cohort! This very well may be what happens when you try and submit your intro info at 4 weeks postpartum… but…. can anyone spot the error on my intro board? 😂😁

OIST is seeking up to four tenure-track or tenured faculty in Ecology, Environmental Science, Earth Science, and Oceanography. Application deadline: Oct 15. Please share. Thx!
www.oist.jp/careers/facu...

Research Fellow at University of Birmingham Apply now for the Research Fellow role on jobs.ac.uk - the leading job board for higher education jobs. View details.

Job opportunity in my lab! We're looking for a post-doc to come join us for an exciting project exploring the evolution of #AMR and #hypervirulence in #klebsiella. Please share!! @unibirmingham.bsky.social Details: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOV067/r...

🚨PHD PROJECT!🚨
Interested in #bacteria, #RNA, #evolution, #biotech, #EnvironmentalMicro?

Opportunity for a fully-funded #PhD with me, @rachelmwheatley.bsky.social, & @walllabuoglasgow.bsky.social via the NorthWestBio DTP:

www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate...

Deadline 21 Nov. #MicroSky Please share!

New pre-print
Competition between phage constrains adaptation to thermal fluctuating temperatures.
More work led by Sam Greenrod in collaboration with @kayla-king.bsky.social lab.
#Phagesky#Microsky

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

Come and work with me and @ariannebabina.bsky.social on #Streptomyces evolution and antibiotic production

Origins of a tangled bank: Adaptation and evolution in antibiotic-producing Streptomyces

www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate...

please repost

🔊 Fully-funded 4yr PhD studentship with the NWB DTP, working on novel regulators of bacterial nitrogen metabolism 🦠
Primary supervisor: @ariannebabina.bsky.social (University of Glasgow)
Co-supervisors: myself (Queen’s Belfast)+ Dónal Wall (Glasgow)
🌟 please share 🌟

www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate...

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

Thanks Joao ☺️ ps one of my group members is reading a bunch of your defence system papers at the moment! They are a big fan