Who is afraid of HGT? True, antibiotic resistances disseminate through it. But we can also leverage the same channels for spreading good stuff at a very large scale and fortifying the env microbiome with beneficial activities www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... by Victor Maull & @ricardsole.bsky.social

Can synthetic biology help save endangered ecosystems?
Our new paper with @vmaull.bsky.social explores how engineered genes can spread through soil microbes.
We model how synthetic gene transfer can support biodiversity. @vdlorenzo.bsky.social @guimaguade.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are so close to start the @cs3conference.bsky.social
Spainish Chapter (CS3) School !! 🎉

One of our invited talks will be delivered by Guim Aguadé-Gorgorió @guimaguade.bsky.social , about a really fascinating topic 👇

A central finding is that, even if we could measure pairwise interactions up to a certain precision, strong indirect effects can make our efforts useless: at high collectivity, pairwise interactions no longer inform about community coexistence
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Some tumors with many mutations are eliminated by immunotherapy, while others evade immune surveillance and eventually relapse. A new mathematical model could help us understand the complex role of mutational load in immunotherapy resistance www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @ricardsole.bsky.social

Immunotherapy fails at curing heterogeneous cancers. Why? Modeling and clinical data suggest a limit to tumor heterogeneity, beyond which T cells fail at controlling highly-diverse tumors. Can we take advantage of this limit? @ricardsole.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Our work is based on two great recent articles that strongly impacted the way I think about complexity in ecology. Inspiring! @changyuchang.bsky.social @asanchezlab.bsky.social

Microbial communities can harbor many species that do not coexist in pairs, yet can coexist in the full community. Here we provide the mathematical foundations of emergent coexistence, and explain why it can't be predicted from pairwise tests www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congrats Lisa!!!

I've used this paper quite a lot and we've discussed with @ricardsole.bsky.social and @vmaull.bsky.social often. Great and useful work!

Super interesting! reminds me of the work by I. Martincorena, finding that epidermic cells can remain healthy even when carrying hundreds of cancer mutations www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...
Maybe genome alterations are not enough and other ecological dynamics play a role?

Thanks! In the paper we mention some ongoing efforts in that direction, but it does still feel a bit futuristic. On my side, I am very interested on the cancer-immune-microbiome ecosystem that you work in! Would love to chat about it at some point :D

Tumors harbor hundreds of different cell types that compete and cooperate, mirroring a natural ecosystem. Can we model cancer as a complex ecosystem of many interacting species?
An honor to work w/ @ricardsole.bsky.social and Sandy Anderson while bringing in recent work in ecology with Sonia Kéfi!