Wow, welcome! Hope you can visit us at the Turner Lab! And hope it’s healing for you to spend some time here.

Thanks for reading and feel free to send me any questions you may have about the work! (10/10)

We feel our work is just the tip of the iceberg.

Filamentous phages are common, particularly in P. aeruginosa, and are able to drive ecologically and clinically important selection in bacterial populations! (9/10)

Overall, our work shows that prophage evolution can drive eco-evolutionary feedbacks across a wide range of population densities.

Further, the pleiotropic consequence of these feedbacks (twitching loss, resistance to lytic phages) are important for bacterial infections. (8/10)

On the bacterial side, every population where hyperactive phage emerged ended up with mutations in type-IV-pilus genes (the phage's cell receptor), reduced twitch motility, and resistance to an obligately lytic phage with potential for use in phage therapy. (7/10)

We sequenced 27 hyperactive phage isolates and found that they derived from one of two filamentous prophages present in the ancestral strain's genome (Pf4 and Pf6). Most of our phage isolates had large genomic deletions and many shared identical SNPs across populations. (6/10)

Follow-up experiments revealed that the cause of inhibitory filtrate was the presence of hyperactive filamentous phage mutants! (5/10)

To our surprise, endpoint populations from both density treatments performed much better than the ancestral strain in filtrates. Rather than benefitting evolved populations, filtrate strongly inhibited the ancestral strain, suggesting that an inhibitory factor was at play. (4/10)

We tested this idea using a 1,000-generation evolution experiment where we passaged P. aeruginosa at either high or low population density and then used microplate growth curves to measure the performance of endpoint populations in the filtrate of their ancestors. (3/10)

We set out to test a long standing hypothesis of eco-evolutionary theory: that high population density, by magnifying the impact of organisms of their environment, should strengthen eco-evolutionary feedbacks. (2/10)

You got this!! Good luck!

Thank you for the encouragement!!

Excited to get to work!

Thanks especially to fearless leaders @reeskassen.bsky.social and Christina Burch, and to @drhhnz.bsky.social and @wcratcliff.bsky.social. It was a great to see the process that led up to an amazing 40th anniversary conference 🎉🍰