Check out the official Phage Names in Table S1, like Escherichia phage MiataMamis, that were inspired by loved ones and colleagues, and will soon be immortalized in the National Library of Medicine. 📜

I’m lucky to have had lots of help with my big postdoc project and a special thanks to @asanchezlab.bsky.social , Kevin Foster, @paulturnerlab.bsky.social, Jonas Schluter, @jgoldford.bsky.social, Odera Nweke, and @asherleeks.bsky.social.

And lastly, our study highlights how phages can live as social organisms. Just like organisms in the macroscopic world, these tiny bits of life find ways to coexist 🫂. (8/8)

Our work shows how ecological “niches” are almost endlessly divisible. Even under strict laboratory conditions, the E.coli population had heterogeneity that phage species could rely on. (7/8)

This study shifts how we think about phage diversity in nature. Phages don’t just rely on host genotypic diversity for coexistence. They use diversity in host phenotypes—similar to how viruses infect different tissues in a human made of genetically identical cells. (6/8)

The E. coli culture wasn’t really a single resource, it’s more like a buffet 🥗 of different cellular phenotypes. Different phage species preferred slow 🥬 or fast 🍅 growing cells which enabled their coexistence. (5/8)

We mapped how each species interacted with their neighbor and found that most species didn’t love sharing their host population ⚔️. So how did they coexist despite this hostility? (4/8)

Coexistence wasn’t random or short-lived, but was stable even when we tried to drive different species towards extinction 🦖 (ie. negative frequency dependent selection). (3/8)

We grew diverse phage species on a clonal (non-evolving) E. coli population and expected one species to beat out all others. Instead we found the opposite: multiple species coexisted in every single community. (2/8)

We asked: Can different phage species (bacterial viruses) coexist on a shared resource 🍝 (a genetically identical E. coli population)? The answer was overwhelmingly yes. (1/8)