@evokerr profile picture
Benjamin Kerr @evokerr
Joined August 2013
  • Tweets 1,778
  • Following 796
  • Followers 3,287
202 Photos and videos
After a truly amazing presentation on “Evolution of Plasmid Transfer Genes in Bacterial Communities”, a huge congratulations to @livkosterlitz for earning the prestigious Plasmid Biology Prize at the 2024 @PlasmidSociety meeting in Hamamatsu Japan!
3
3
28
2,483
How does exposure to different hosts affect evolution of bacterial genes on mobile elements? In @MolBioEvol, @livkosterlitz et al use barcode methods to compare adaptive landscapes across species & show alignment enables a form of adaptive “crowdsourcing”🧵academic.oup.com/mbe/article…

Evolutionary “Crowdsourcing”: Alignment of Fitness Landscapes Allows for Cross-species Adaptation...

Abstract. Genes that undergo horizontal gene transfer (HGT) evolve in different genomic backgrounds. Despite the ubiquity of cross-species HGT, the effects

academic.oup.com
4
40
105
23,618
more replies
Horizontal gene transfer is commonplace in bacterial communities. Here we see that if landscapes align adequately, vehicles of HGT (e.g. conjugative plasmids) may enable a distributed form of genetic evolution among community members, allowing species to adaptively “crowdsource.”
1
4
507
This work was spearheaded by @livkosterlitz in collaboration with @nate_grassi, @baileymwerner, @RS_McGee, and @EvaTop3. We are thrilled to see it appear in @MolBioEvol!
2
5
543
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
María Rebolleda@MRebolleda
31 Jul 2023
🔴 New preprint 🔴 This one is the first with someone from my lab as an author! We used previously identified metabolic rules to predict microbial community assembly along a temperature gradient (1/12). biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

Predictive microbial community changes across a temperature gradient

A central challenge in community ecology is predicting the effects of abiotic factors on community assembly. In particular, microbial communities play a central role in the ecosystem, but we do not...

biorxiv.org
3
37
116
17,691
Benjamin Kerr@evokerr
13 Jul 2023
Exciting new resource for math bio folks!
Alex Best@DrAlexBest
13 Jul 2023
🚨🚨New textbook alert!!🚨🚨 Introducing Mathematical Biology: An Open Education Resource sheffield.pressbooks.pub/int… Key points: * It's FREE * It's interactive * It's accessible * It's...standard math-bio content for undergrads but did I mention it's FREE?
2
3
1,896
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
María Rebolleda@MRebolleda
12 Jun 2023
I am so excited to read this! I love how each of these authors thinks!
Benjamin Kerr@evokerr
24 Mar 2023
What prevents multicellular organisms from evolving back to their ancestral state of unicellularity? In a new preprint, @peterlconlin, Heather Goldsby and colleagues show how division of labor can lead to the entrenchment of multicellularity. 🧵(1/14) biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
1
1
7
1,092
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
SSE@sse_evolution
25 May 2023
Congratulations to Dr. Sally Otto, recipient of the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award! Don't miss her award talk on Friday, June 2 at virtual #Evol2023! evolutionsociety.org/news/di… @sarperotto @Evol_mtg
Text: Sarah Sally Otto, 2023 Society for the Study of Evolution Lifetime Achievement Award. Headshot of Sally Otto.

ALT Text: Sarah Sally Otto, 2023 Society for the Study of Evolution Lifetime Achievement Award. Headshot of Sally Otto.

7
54
307
41,141
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
María Rebolleda@MRebolleda
22 May 2023
I have some preliminary good news, the short of it is that I will be hiring a postdoc soon to work on a collaborative project with Dr. Seunghyun Sim (an amazing chemist) to evaluate the role of spatial structure in community function using bio-printing and directed evolution.
1
8
33
9,762
Benjamin Kerr@evokerr
13 May 2023
A wonderful new resource for HGT research! After separately contributing creative new techniques to measure plasmid conjugation, @livkosterlitz & @Jana_Huisman teamed up to write a comprehensive and insightful set of guidelines on the topic. Check out the thread and paper! 👇
Olivia Kosterlitz@livkosterlitz
13 May 2023
Ever wondered about estimating & reporting plasmid conjugation rates? We did too! Excited to share our new paper in Plasmid, where we propose guidelines for estimating & reporting these experiments. authors.elsevier.com/c/1h3ZU… Thread👇
4
12
4,439
Benjamin Kerr@evokerr
10 May 2023
In case you're looking for an article to inspire you, check out this superb new offering from @ozan_g_b, @dahaj1897, @YunkerLab, @wc_ratcliff, and their colleagues. Big congratulations (even bigger than the evolved yeast snowflakes!) to the team on this exciting work!!
Nature Microbiology@NatureMicrobiol
10 May 2023
Out now in @Nature: De novo evolution of macroscopic multicellularity By G. Ozan Bozdag, Seyed Alireza Zamani-Daha, Peter Yunker, William Ratcliff & colleagues. @wc_ratcliff nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
2
3
19
2,707
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
Alison Feder@AlisonFeder
9 May 2023
Rapid recombination is an important driver of HIV intra-host evolution. Because recombination requires that multiple viruses co-infect a cell, Elena Romero and I wondered if high viral loads increase HIV's recombination rate. tl;dr: we think they do! biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
6
52
179
44,328
Benjamin Kerr retweeted
Will Ratcliff@wc_ratcliff
8 May 2023
Replying to @CurrentBiology
@CurrentBiology just published two cool papers on the role of life cycles in the evolution of multicellularity. One by @EvolvingMurray and Julien Barrere, and the other by @Hammerschmidt_K et al. @peterlconlin and I discuss them in this Insight article: sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
1
12
50
6,395
Load more