Oh my god why am I actually crying?
19.01.2026 12:15
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Oh my god why am I actually crying?
Hey Franz! I hadn't seen those results yet! Super interesting stuff there!
Those discussions were the very best memories I took from Grad School
This Plasmid Project was directly inspired by the results on multilevel selection that Dan introduced me to! In this thread he explains some fundamental theoretical results that were so influential to me as a Scientist. Looking forward to more Math-driven experiments!!! Thanks Dan!
Thank you so so much Franz!!!
Thank you so so much Zam! I'm excited for whatever is to come!
This is it!!! This is the work I never want to stop hearing about. Kepler’s creativity and curiosity really shine through in this paper. Give it a read and enjoy 😎
Irei para a Suécia nem que seja só pra tomar esse café!!! Grande abraço!
By the way, Zurich people lets get coffee!
This has been an intense, crazy week. My plasmid competition paper is finally out and we have a new preprint on Bioarxiv! Plus I'm leaving the US after 10 years here. See you soon America! Hello Zurich!!!
The best dude:
Working with @kepatitis-c.bsky.social was a privilege. Kep is the forbidden trifecta: brilliant, tireless, and the kindest person you'll ever meet! Beyond that, he's an army in one: a bioinformatician, a statistician, an experimentalist, and a cheerleader. Thanks man!
Kep's thread explains the work beautifully, so you should check it out! I do want to add that this project changed the way I think about the sources of evolvability and downstream fitness benefits.
When different kinds of mobile genetic elements get together, they become even more powerful catalysts for microbial evolution! In this work we discovered a mechanism by which Insertion Sequences drive their spread across Plasmids, which helps explain this evolutionary potential!
Hi Jack! It's not out yet! Final moments of revision! But the final version should be content wise very similar to the bioarxiv version. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
And a nail in the coffin of Hamilton's rule!
"Fernando, I'm not gonna sugar coat it: those are the worst reads I've ever seen. What are you putting in there?" Then proceeds to troubleshoot and help me solve the issue. Amazing people.
Hey Elizabeth! I use a method to take leaf pics with my students that should work. Illuminate from below! Take a piece of plexiglass, put a piece of white paper on it and then the dish on top of that. Illuminate from below with a flashlight, 1 meter below the plexiglass. Turn off other lights
Hey Jack, thank you so so much! We have a paper in the works that is very related to co-transformations as well! As for the inspiration for this one, I came up with the idea from a theoretical curiosity. It's fun how projects can be born from both theory and experiments!
YaY!!!!! I hope you enjoy it!!!! :)
Thank you so so much!
Sebastian, that makes me so so happy :)
Finally, I'm so so thankful for my collaborators Carlos Sanchez (the best person), Daniel Eaton, and Johan Paulsson. In particular, thanks @baym.lol m for taking a chance on a non-traditional candidate that was proposing a weird project! (21/n)
I hope I convinced you that plasmids are a really cool system to study one of the most defining features of life: multi-scale evolution! (20/n)
Overall, we found out that tradeoffs of within- and between-cell fitness modulate fixation probabilities of plasmid variants, shaping their evolution. Moreover, the dominance curves of plasmid-encoded traits have unintuitive effects on these evolutionary trajectories! (19/n)
We modified our dimer system to release a plasmid that had been chromosomally integrated, creating an invasion-like initial condition. These experiments corroborated theoretical predictions, showing that the high dominance, strong RBS plasmids are favored when invading (18/n)
However, the same model suggested that if the beneficial blue plasmid were initialized with a single copy in each cell, simulating the invasion of a novel type, then a strong RBS should favor invading plasmid fixation. Could we experimentally test this prediction? (17/n)
Once again modelling came to the rescue! Simulations revealed that if a plasmid with a strong RBS has a more dominant trait, then a fitness flatness might actually slow down the fixation of the beneficial plasmid from an equilibrated initial condition. (16/n)
We thought that the big-benefit blue plasmid (rather than the low-benefit) would win faster against the no-benefit red plasmid, but the opposite occurred. I was so surprised that I checked the sequences a million times. Why did the low-benefit plasmid win faster? (15/n)
But here's where another mystery showed up. We had two versions of our blue antibiotic resistance plasmid. One with a strong RBS, giving the cells a big benefit, and one with a weak RBS giving a small benefit. Both had the same promoter and similar within cell fitness. (14/n)