I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026! The Microbial Ecosystems Lab @hot-mes-asu.bsky.social at ASU studies microbial interactions, spatial ecology, and imaging-driven microbiome science. If you love microbes, microfluidics, or single-cell analysis, let’s talk! www.microbialeco.systems

Our Vibrios were the last ones to make the intercontinental move and are excited to be in their new surroundings!

Heading back home after a great AEM GRC! Great meeting and thanks for the invite and organisation @deniseakob.bsky.social @environmicrobio.bsky.social @thuls.bsky.social!

A milestone I never imagined when I started my career. Our recent @science.org (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) paper ended up on the front page of one of the biggest newspapers in India! Sneaked in amidst the gloomy stories of the world we live in.

On the day our new paper is out www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Nikon delivered our new microscope—perfect timing as we forge ahead into the next chapter!

This story started when we put two Vibrio species commonly found in the coastal oceans under the microscope. V. anguillarum cannot grow on alginate, an algal polysaccharide, but V. cyclitrophicus can. So how does the former species grow? The answer: By killing the ones that can

#Microsky #T6SS

Spent a fun Friday with the media team @arizonastateuni.bsky.social on an exciting research update! Stay tuned 👀

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But the cooler and surprising finding: Killers with T6SS tended to have lesser anabolic and catabolic pathways/genes. Signs of adaptation. Makes sense, right? If you can kill and acquire nutrients, why carry the genetic repertoire to run these anabolic or catabolic pathways.

While this was cool to see these ecological dynamics at the microscale, we wondered if our observations under the microscope had wide spread macroscale ramifications. Scanning environmental datasets we found that the T6SS was pretty widespread! Perhaps unsurprising.

We found this behaviour in multiple vibrios: ordalii and even v cholerae! The cool thing about cholerae, we can observe killing (blue foci firing up) in action!

but when T6SS killers were present with prey on a carbon source that only prey could utilise, the killers waited for prey cells to grow and ultimately shot toxins into prey, thereby leaking nutrients from prey cells. The killers than acquired these nutrients and resumed their growth

For me an amazing aspect of this discovery was going back to the roots of microbiology: observing cells under the microscope. When T6SS killers were present along with prey on a carbon source that both types can metabolise- the killers wiped out prey cells

New work out in @eLife! Possibly the last one in our series on bacterial aggregation behaviours on polysaccharides. We knew cells were engaging in collective behaviours. But how do they know when to leave and why? We provide potential answers in this work

elifesciences.org/articles/93855

What's next? More about how cross-feeding dynamics at the microscale affects global properties of natural communities in changing environments. We are just getting started!

When your fancy new image analysis pipeline starts churning out microscale growth dynamics of microbial communities. Amazing to see so much heterogeneity in growth rates even in a clonal population.

When you hike in Switzerland!