Great to have Dr David Sünderhauf visit Oxford over the past couple of days!

A really nice talk on competition between plasmids carrying CRISPR-Cas and Toxin-antitoxin systems. Theory, experiments and bioinformatics all in one project!

@davvi36.bsky.social @biology.ox.ac.uk

Interested in using genomics to study bacterial cooperation?

We’ve got 2 brilliant posters at #Microbio25 today: Zohar Katz (A276) and Rosie Randall (A098).

Go say hi to them! 🦠 🧬

We also found that only ~2% of genes for cooperation were carried by bacterial plasmids - the rest (~98%) were on chromosomes.

Something else other than horizontal gene transfer via plasmids must maintain cooperation for those chromosomal cooperative traits.

This was particularly true for genes coding for more complex cooperative traits, such as public good molecules which are produced by a secondary metabolite gene cluster.

Instead of being overrepresented on plasmids, we found that genes for cooperation were actually more likely to be carried by chromosomes.

Interested in social evolution in bacteria? Our new tool 'SOCfinder' can identify genes coding for social traits in bacterial genomes 🧬🦠

Out now in Microbial Genomics: doi.org/10.1099/mgen...