October 26, 2017

Please spread the word - applications for the Microbial Diversity course at the MBL open soon. Rachel Whitaker and I will be serving as co-Directors. We'll be exploring everything from phages, to metabolic modeling to ecosystem-scale questions. You won't want to miss it! The link is here.

October 22, 2017

Kewei Li, Ph.D. is a visiting scientist from Wenzhou Medical University.  He is working on gut microbial communities relevant to cystic fibrosis.  Welcome!

October 20, 2017

Check out the special meeting sections in this issue of the journal of Bacteriology for the ASM conference on Mechanisms of Interbacterial Cooperation and Competition.  The cover image for the issue is shown on the left.

October 11, 2017

I have had a growing interest in academic publishing in recent years.  Roberto Kolter and I had a conversation about this topic in a recent Small Things Considered blog post.  There was also an interesting article on the history of the publication industrial complex in the Gaurdian.

October 09, 2017

Jarrod Smith's thesis work describes how we think the LapA adhesin is anchored to the outer membrane of bacteria.  We've posted the preprint on BioRxiv.

October 06, 2017

Some of our work looking at CRISPR targeting of phage lysogens  (we call this self-targeting) was included in the most recent addition of the textbook Microbiology, authored by Joan Slonczewski and John Foster.  This work was done by two former graduate students, Kyle Cady and Gary Heussler, and you can find a couple of relevant papers here and here.  A review of unusual CRISPR functions in bacteria can be found here.

October 05, 2017

We've taken our first foray into preprint servers with an analysis of the c-di-GMP network of P. fluorescens. The manuscript is titled "A Multimodal Strategy Used By A Large c-di-GMP Network", and Kurt Dahltrom and Alan Collins have taken the lead on this manuscript. You can check out the manuscript here.