My first theory project! I've really enjoyed how we could decompose complex dynamics into those of individual lineages.

This approach is quite flexible, and we're hoping to extend it to more complex scenarios, including N(t) and certain forms of positive selection!

and 2) global spread of particular sequences. (btw @rwolff.bsky.social and @nanditagarud.bsky.social recently found more evidence of global selective sweeps in these gut bacteria. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...)

We also found some evidence that many recombined segments are strongly selected, leading to 1) within-host sweeps

What might cause all these fine-scale variations? Many factors are commonly thought to impact realized recombination rate. Here we were able to rule out the effect of sequence divergence, which plays very little role in almost all gut species (Fig 4 & W in SI are probably my favorite figures)

We found extensive heterogeneity in the rates and lengths of recombination, both between species and within species.

However, that was only a coarse summary of recombination at the species level. Using closely related strains found in the dataset, we were able to directly identify individual recombination events.

Here are some highlights of what we found. First and foremost, gut bacterial species recombine quite a lot -- certainly closer to H pylori than to M tuberculosis, the two extremes in the microbial world when it comes to recombination

Hello world! I have nothing to say yet, but check out these Karman vortices (I think?) in my pour over coffee