Deadline for this is tonight! Now is the time to sign up!!

The Xue lab at UC Irvine is looking for a staff scientist to support our work investigating how microbes interact and evolve in the gut microbiome! Open to a wide range of previous experience levels, see ad for more.
recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09601

In @elife.bsky.social: Bacteriophage infection drives loss of β-lactam resistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

I'm excited to announced that the version of record of this article is out in @elife.bsky.social. With the other first coauthor My Tran, we found that phage resistance cause reduced beta-lactam resistance and reduced virulence phenotypes in diverse MRSA strains.

elifesciences.org/articles/102...

Want to write to your community about the importance of science funding?

Join me on zoom this Friday at 12pm ET / 9am PT to learn to write an op-ed as part of the #McClintockLetters initiative!

Sign up to write a letter and register for the workshop here:
blogs.cornell.edu/asap/events-...

(1/7) Very excited to share my first PhD preprint on the interactions of two of my favorite mobile genetic elements: phages and group II introns!

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

Scientists, reach out to your local communities about the importance of funding science! Write an op-ed to your local newspaper as part of the #McClintockLetters.

Please spread the word and sign up! DM me if you're interested and need help getting started. I'm trained as a writer and happy to help.

This is a fantastic initiative and I would highly encourage folks to participate!

I wrote/interviewed folx shortly after everything started to crumble in Jan, but I was re-reminded that communities prevail. There are amazing people doing beautiful things to improve our communities, and I’m excited to highlight their work. berkeleysciencereview.com/article/2025...

The 2nd Hablemos de Ciencia Symposium was a success! This event was started last year to create a venue for UW-Madison researchers to communicate science in Spanish. Science is done for and by speakers of different languages. The language(s) that we use to communicate science should reflect that!

Really honored to read this thoughtful perspective on our paper, thanks so much to @contaminatedsci.bsky.social!

1/ Hey y'all, I'm excited to share my latest paper, which is out now in PNAS! We introduce FAVA, a statistical framework to measure compositional variability across microbiome samples. If you want to measure variability across a stacked bar plot, FAVA is for you! Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Huge thank you to my mentors @ksxue.bsky.social, KC Huang, David Relman, @benjaminhgood.bsky.social, @petrovadmitri.bsky.social, and everyone else involved in the work for their valuable feedback and suggestions throughout, and I’m super excited to finally have this out in the world!

Overall, our findings demonstrate that initial conditions can have a lasting impact on the outcomes of species introductions, and that these impacts are especially pronounced in diverse communities.

Using a consumer-resource model and metabolomics, we identified niche overlap between introduced and resident species as a strong predictor of the importance of initial dose.

The answer? It’s complicated, of course, and depends on the identity of the introduced microbes and which species are already present. Across a set of mixtures of gut microbial communities, we observed a range of species colonization behaviors from dose independence to strong dose dependence.

To do this, we mixed a set of in vitro gut microbial communities together at various initial ratios ranging over six orders of magnitude, and we used 16S sequencing to track the final relative abundances of each species after ~40 generations of growth.

I’m thrilled to share my first ever publication, now published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

With mentorship from the amazing @ksxue.bsky.social, I looked at how the outcomes of species introductions to microbial communities are influenced by the number of introduced microbes.

shoutout to secretarybird, one of the most underrated birds

I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to work with Katherine over the last five years, she’s a truly amazing and one of a kind mentor and person! Would highly encourage any interested students or postdocs to reach out to her!

I’d love to be added, thanks!

I am mobilizing + giving free weekly science communication workshops in a private community for scientists + media who want to join the battle vs misinformation. I wasn't planning on doing this so soon but this is urgent. ALL scientists "hard" + "soft" DM with your credentials for details.

I’d love to be added!

Tried to put together a Microbial Evolution starter pack, but there were so many great people I didn't want to leave out it turned into 3 starter packs

Comment or DM me if you were missed or would like to be added!

A thread (1/3)

go.bsky.app/6pkuYhi