Dear colleagues!

@davidmccandlish.bsky.social and I are serving as guest editors for the new special issue of GENETICS on fitness landscapes:

doi.org/10.1093/gene...

Submissions are due on March 18, 2026. Please spread the word! And reach out if you have questions.

This is so good Pleuni! I’m going to save it as a science communication example where communication aimed at the public is also better for scientists (I just learned a lot), and share with this year’s ramp cohort!

I made a video about my new paper. I hope you enjoy it!

vimeo.com/1113132836?s...

The Church Evolution Laboratory (CEL@NYU) will be official as of Sep 1st: shchurch.github.io. We are recruiting at all levels, including a postdoc to work on evolutionary patterns and processes via comparative genomics in Hawaiian Drosophila. Please share widely!

Excited to share a new preprint w/ the Sonnenberg lab, led by Matt Carter, @zzzhiru.bsky.social & @mattolm.bsky.social. We analyzed the microbiomes of two non-industrialized populations from opposite sides of the globe to try to reconstruct the recent evolutionary history of our gut microbiota.

I'm very excited to share something I've been working on off-and-on for a long time now: a new blog about genotype-phenotype landscapes! The first post is a Gödel-Escher-Bach-style dialogue to introduce the topic. If you like it please share/repost! open.substack.com/pub/topossib...

Great big review, and I particularly love the consistent and simple visual language in the figures!

Published in Nature today! Here, we sought to systematically ask how natural community's metabolism changes with the environment. A simple consumer-resource model can predict N-cycle metabolism (nitrate use) and, more importantly, the mechanism behind its change.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Oh amazing, thanks for making this! Could you add me too? See you tomorrow!

New Preprint!! Alejandro González-Delgado accomplished a major feat on this one: ported retron recombineering, which we love so much in E. coli, into 14 new bacterial species via a massive collaborative effort involving 9 labs!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share our study on sailing siphonophores, AKA bluebottles or man-o'-war! 🌊 we received hundreds of samples from scientists around the world, part of a huge effort to sequence genomes and test for multiple species 🧬 out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... 🦑🧪📌

Why is sex so common if it's so costly?
Super excited to share our new preprint “Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation”, where we bring a new angle to this age-old evolutionary question. Co-led by Parris Humphrey, in Michael Desai's lab. Short thread here: (1/n)

Third preprint! – We use community-function landscapes to rationally design communities for bioremediation in soils! Spoiler - it works! Led by Mahmoud Yousef, with @kiseokmicro.bsky.social, J. Tang, V. Charisopoulos, B Willett. @nitmb.bsky.social, NSF, MSTP UChicago. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Also shout out to @bkoskella.bsky.social for making RaMP happen and advising on this project!

Eligibility info:

Hi y'all! Know any recent or upcoming college graduates who are interested in microbiology and looking for (full-time! paid!) research experience? Please point them towards RaMP! Darian Doakes and I will be co-mentors for an MGE project that I think is going to be really cool. Apps+recs due 5/25

🚀 New proposal from Align! The experimental platform aims to standardize #microbial #phenotyping & support predictive modeling. 🦠 Capturing data across 1k strains & 1k conditions; using BacterAI; generating high-quality datasets for ML @jensen_lab

Yo, micro/evo/qbio/physics of living systems/astrobiology/renegade cell bio folks- if you are interested in starting a feed, reply/repost this. Let's get the crew back together!

10/10 alt text, these are my favorite miniature worlds.

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/...

Do mutations that drive evolution improve many traits or few?

Does this change over the course of evolution?

Excited to share our work in PLOS Biology exploring these questions in the first 2 adaptive steps w/ Yuping Li, @gsherloc.bsky.social, @petrovadmitri.bsky.social 🧵

doi.org/10.1371/jour...