For #InternationalMicroorganismDay, we asked our FEMS MICRO 2025 Keynote Speakers and FEMS Journal Editors "'What is your favourite microbe?''

With delightful answers, ranging over many microbes and personal stories, this was the perfect way to celebrate IMD 2025! #MicroSky

youtu.be/oEJsWNJCtBw

Happy International Microorganism Day, to my whole beautiful community! 🧫🔬🧪

Do plasmids evolve faster 🐇, slower 🐢, or just like chromosomes 🧬?

In our new paper, we tackled this question using theory, simulations, bioinformatics, and experiments!

👇 Check out all the details in Paula’s thread!

Hint: 🐇 (most of the time)

This work is finally published! 🥳🧬
Plasmids are associated with very variable fitness costs in their different bacterial hosts. But, what is the contribution of each of the plasmid-genes in these host-specific effects? Study led by
@jorgesastred.bsky.social, @sanmillan.bsky.social and myself! 1/14

Plasmids can be lost from a bacterial community even under positive environmental selection: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

New preprint with my HFSP collaborators. Network structures for bacterial and plasmid interactions determine community structure and evolvability: doi.org/10.32942/X21...

Is the era of microbial metagenomics over? Check out our new preprint on using species abundance distributions to predict plasmid maintenance in bacterial communities: arxiv.org/abs/2509.01695

Everyone in the past was neurotypical, which is how we got things like this single-author, eight-volume encyclopedia of ferns

It seems Tesla is detecting vehicles that may have problems, and artificially running their odometers faster so the warranty expires before they have to do any service

Just incredible grift

New postdoc position in our lab (2 y+): evolutionary genomics of integrons and MGEs with focus on vibrio-phage interactions. Great environment @pasteur.fr for science, career building. Super collaborators @celineloot.bsky.social @amazeld.bsky.social @fredoleroux.bsky.social 3 weeks to apply!

Can anyone recommend papers where authors look at pairwise interactions between bacteria within a community context? i.e. interaction strength between strain A and strain B when co-cultured with several/many other strains.

Thanks!

Ecological histories govern social exploitation by microorganisms

#ISMEJournal by @evokait.bsky.social et al from Greg Velicer

academic.oup.com/ismej/advanc...

So excited that @relenski.bsky.social is the 2025 Microbiology Society Prize Medalist! What a role model, both for research and as a citizen of science

www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

Excited to share: The inaugural Alma Dal Co School on Collective Behavior is coming to Venice (Sep 29-Oct 4, 2025). This unique school honors Alma (1989-2022), whose brilliant work bridging physics and microbiology revealed how metabolic interactions structure microbial communities. 1/12

This. If you invite 40 people to a 2 hour meeting, or get them to complete 2 hrs of paperwork, you’re effectively ‘spending’ 2 weeks’ worth of productive institutional time…

My colleagues and I are excited to announce our lovely new website showcasing the experimental evolution work with Myxococcus xanthus, a social and predatory soil bacterium. It's a great resource for anyone interested in microbial ecology/evolution or social evolution:

www.myxoee.org

Evolution of cooperation: thinking of cheaters as having a "host range" of permissible cooperators for my paper "Allopatric divergence of cooperators confers cheating resistance and limits effects of a defector mutation"

doi.org/10.1186/s128...

Check out my new preprint on how resource history impacts cheating and facultative exploitation in Myxococcus xanthus!

Ecological histories determine the success of social exploitation biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

with an AI summary: sciencecast.org/casts/paevzn7t