A single bacteriophage can dominate microbial communities yet only evolves when migration changes its ecological context.

Biological communities are complex, dynamic systems that underpin ecosystem functionality, yet their long-term dynamics and predictability remain poorly understood. Understanding how Darwinian evoluti...

In natural habitats, nutrient availability limits bacterial growth. We discovered that bacteria can overcome this limitation by acquiring nutrients by lysing neighboring cells through contact-dependen...

Understanding how and why human skin bacteria differ from our closest animal relatives provides crucial insights into human evolution and health. While we have known that human facial skin hosts disti...

Rapid genetic adaptation to environmental change, or evolutionary rescue, can be constrained by a less adaptable mutualistic partner. Here, the authors explore evolutionary rescue in an obligate mutua...

Classical models from theoretical ecology are seeing increasing uptake in microbial ecology, but there remains rich potential for closer cross-pollination. Here we explore opportunities for stronger ....

Recent studies have revealed bacterial genome-wide evolution to be complex and dynamic even in a constant environment. The evolution is characterized by the emergence of new clades competing or tempor...

Many microorganisms are refractory to laboratory cultivation. One possible explanation, known as the great plate count anomaly, is metabolic dependencies among community members. However, systematic s...

Nature Ecology & Evolution - Community resilience to stress is affected by factors such as pre-exposure to the same stress and intercommunity dispersal. The authors show that pre-exposing the...

It is widely believed that due to nutrient limitations in natural environments, bacteria spend most of their life in non-growing states. However, very little is known about how bacteria change their p...

Microbial populations are often exposed to long-term abiotic disturbances, which can reduce population viability and cause local extinction. Eco-evolutionary theory suggests that spatial refuges can f...

Bacteriophages are the most abundant and phylogenetically diverse biological entities on Earth, yet the ecological mechanisms that sustain this extraordinary diversity remain unclear. In this study, w...

Improving evolutionary forecasting requires progressing from studying repeated evolution of a single genotype under identical conditions to formulating broad principles. These principles should enable...

Evolution is expected to involve mutations that are small and modular in effect, but recent findings suggest that mutations early in an adaptive process can have strong and pleiotropic effects. This s...

This Perspective explores why microbiome members perform partial metabolism of substrates and suggests that proteome efficiency is a driver of collective microbiome metabolism.

While the evolutionary interests of mobile genetic elements may differ from those of their bacterial hosts, these elements can be beneficial for their hosts by delivering, disrupting, or activating ge...

Protein synthesis is an important determinant of microbial growth and response that demands a high amount of metabolic and biosynthetic resources. Des…

The rising prevalence of antimicrobial resistance is a significant global health crisis. However, nitrofurantoin remains an outlier, with low resistance rates despite prolonged and sustained use. This...

Genome sequence mining and computational analyses lead to the discovery and functional characterization of conserved bacterial toxins with activity against bacteria and fungi.

Oscillations are a recurrent phenomenon in biological systems across scales, but deciphering their fundamental principles is very challenging. Here the authors construct a synthetic oscillator in bact...

bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution