This is shocking, and should be considered seriously by anyone in a supervisory role. At this time of year, students are signing all kinds of safety forms to protect their physical health — from GMOs, phenol, back pain... Mental health needs to be part of that conversation too.

Very pleased to see this finally out! cell.com/cell-systems/f… We study convergence and divergence in microbial community assembly in replicate habitats. Work with the marvellous Alvaro Sanchez Lab team @jccvila @mrebolleda Chang-Yu Chang 張昌祐 Alicia SanchezGorostiaga N. Lu & Josh Goldford

Sarah in our Ecosystems and Global Change Group has been working hard on the first major experiment of her #PhD 👩‍🔬 which will tell us how bacterial communities use different carbon compounds isolated from the natural environment 🦠 The #carboncycle is changing, are #microbes adapting?

I often think of the Amos Tversky quote “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” & how much effort academics have to put into showing how “busy” they are. No CV has a section for “thinking time”.

Very excited to have been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, Clear-Water, to study eco-evolution of complex bacterial communities. Thanks Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for funding and thanks to my colleagues Ecosystems and Global Change Group & @otto_seppala and collaborators Alvaro Sanchez Lab.

New preprint from 1st-author Chang-Yu Chang 張昌祐. We find that coexisting members of stable bacterial communities generally fail to coexist in pairwise co-culture, highlighting the importance of the ecological context provided by additional community members biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

4 attempts for the Marie-Curie and finally successful this March; today this: Dear Madam/Sir, The Grant Agreement preparation of your proposal for the above project has been terminated. The proposal is now rejected.😵‍💫😡

I am pleased to announce that Tim Barraclough from the University of Oxford is going to give us a talk next Wednesday, the 9nd of November at 2 pm CET, in our Mondsee seminar series. If you are interested, get in touch with me: [email protected]

We will have Kayla King from Oxford next Wednesday in our Seminar series giving us a talk. If interested email me ([email protected]) and I will share the zoom link.

Looking forward to read this. nature.com/articles/s4156…

We assembled a manuscript with conceptual ideas how bacteria evolve in complex communities. It is a continuation of our Community-Evolution study (Scheuerl et al. 2020, Nature Communication). If you are interested, please find the MS on EcoEvoRxiv DOI: doi.org/10.32942/X21G95.

We are particularly interested in highlighting the interplay between α-niches and β-niches and how this should affect evolutionary processes.

I would be very happy to get feedback and learn what people think about it. So, please feel free to read and comment on it. Or just share with people who might be…

The concept is related with the question how to steer evolution of bacterial species into specific directions. There are studies that show that bacteria evolve different in a community background compared to single species assays.

Thus, using biotic forces to modify evolutionary trajectories sounds logical to attempt, however, this is not trivial and calls for detailed knowledge. One factor is how species occupy niches and how they affect each other in these niches.

Differences in α-niche traits (e.g. resources) permit coexistence between species and community evolved bacteria start using alternative resources or waste products (See Figure).

On the other side, β-niche traits determine survival in a particular environment and tend to be experienced by co-occurring organisms in similar ways (e.g. temperature).

So, while interspecific interactions are likely to have an effect how bacteria evolve using different resources, interactions should have little direct effect on evolutionary responses when the abiotic environment changes.

However, when species evolutionary broaden their niche α-space, we suggest that it is very likely to see indirect modifications on evolving β-niche traits.