Are you ready to vote? Register, check your voter registration, request a mail-in ballot, and find out what’s on your ballot. The decisions we make in the upcoming election will impact our health for ...

The Secor Lab seeks a postdoctoral researcher to investigate bacteriophage biology in the Lyme disease spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi. The successful candidate will help define how phiBB-1 controls h...

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) appreciates your interest in employment. We ask that you keep in mind the following when completing your application: Once you start the application process ...

Terroir describes the link between a product’s distinct characteristics and its geographic origin and has been a central principle in viticulture for centuries. Traditionally, terroir is understood to be influenced by both environmental and human factors, including soil characteristics, local climate, topography, viticultural practices, and regional choice of grapevine cultivar. This is reflected in regulations like protected denomination of origins (PDO), which are strictly defined over features such as distinct climatic conditions and geology, authorized cultivars, and often traditional management practices (1).

Staphylococcus aureus is a commensal Gram-positive bacterium and opportunistic pathogen that exhibits substantial variation in antimicrobial resistance and virulence traits. S. aureus is frequently co-isolated...

When obtaining bacterial isolates from infections, it is important to consider the ecological biases introduced by methods used for collection and processing. In this study, we demonstrate how reducti...

A toxicology journal has retracted a 16-year-old study linking hepatitis B vaccines to autism in children following an independent statistical review that found a half-dozen concerns with the study…

We demonstrate that in a porcine full-thickness thermal injury wound model, a Pseudomonas aeruginosa mutant deficient in biofilm formation undergoes adaptive evolution by acquiring mutations that alter the outer membrane, either type IV pili (T4P) or lipopolysaccharide (LPS) mutations, that restores the deficient biofilm phenotype. We also observe a striking degree of mutational parallelism, at both the biosynthetic pathway and gene level, indicating the strong selective pressures experienced by these pathways during chronic wound infection.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has awarded three new Centers for Accelerating Phage Therapy to Combat ESKAPE Pathogens (CAPT-CEP)—the first coordinated U.S. research...

Scientists are getting closer to a universal nasal vaccine that could protect against respiratory viruses, bacteria and even allergies

Complex multicellularity has evolved in just five lineages (animals, plants, brown algae, red algae, and fungi) and in each case, these organisms develop clonally and are obligately multicellular. While prior work has shown that clonal development plays a critical role in the evolution of complex multicellularity, none has disentangled this from the impact of obligate vs facultative multicellular life cycles. Here we use experimental evolution with engineered snowflake yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae ) to directly test how life cycle structure affects multicellular adaptation. We created isogenic strains capable of switching between unicellular and clonal multicellular phases, then evolved populations for 192 days under obligately multicellular, facultatively multicellular, and obligately unicellular regimes. Obligately multicellular populations rapidly evolved larger size, primarily driven by a whole genome duplication, in all five replicates. Facultative populations showed dramatically constrained evolution, with tetraploidy evolving in only 2/10 facultative populations despite experiments demonstrating that it is strongly beneficial across the full life cycle. Mathematical modeling reveals the mechanistic basis for this constraint: facultative life cycles create establishment barriers through two population genetic effects. Group formation dramatically reduces the number of units of selection, making beneficial multicellular mutations vulnerable to drift. This asymmetry in population size between life cycle phases also allows cell-level selection to overpower group-level selection, eliminating mutations that provide group-level benefits but carry cell-level costs. These findings demonstrate that obligate multicellularity circumvents fundamental population genetic barriers to collective-level adaptation, helping explain why complex multicellularity has evolved exclusively in obligately multicellular lineages, and suggesting similar constraints may operate in other evolutionary transitions in individuality. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. U.S. National Science Foundation, https://ror.org/021nxhr62, DEB-1845363 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Gilliam Fellowship National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

Metals are essential trace elements for almost all organisms including bacteria. Yet, metals are toxic at high concentrations, requiring fine-tuned regulatory mechanisms to steer metal homeostasis ins...

Learn about the new features and improvements in Bactopia version 4.

The purpose of these awards is to provide support for students entering U.S.-based Ph.D. programs with a plan to perform research in ecology and evolution. While we will consider all projects in ecolo...

Position Summary The Barrick and Lenski Labs in the Department of Microbiology, Genetics, & Immunology at Michigan State University are seeking a Research Assistant II to manage their research ope...

MIT - Computational Biology Program Scientist - Cambridge MA 02139

Natural Sciences Podcast · Updated weekly · Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through scienc...

Continuous monoculture of banana can result in proliferation of parasitic nematodes. Here the authors show that in the long term, soil can become suppressive to disease and this is associated with enr...