cmarx2014

New PLoS Genetics paper; Harvard Crimson article; Mary Lidstrom wins Procter & Gamble Award; Will’s future job

The last two weeks have seen much good news. First, Sean’s PLoS Genetics paper came out which describes analyses of global gene expression that occurred immediately after metabolic engineering of formaldehyde metabolism in Methylobacterium (i.e., acclimation to the new pathway) and after eight populations evolved to grow on methanol using a new pathway (i.e., adaptation). Remarkably, although there were massiveContinue reading “New PLoS Genetics paper; Harvard Crimson article; Mary Lidstrom wins Procter & Gamble Award; Will’s future job”

Praise for Miki’s paper; TV show; ASM Distinguished Lectureship

1. In the past three weeks we’ve been fortunate to have received some additional press for Miki’s recent paper mentioned in the prior post. Beyond being a ‘Highlighted Paper‘ in the March issue of Genetics, we were kindly recommended by Deborah Charlesworth of the Faculty of 1000, and the Harvard Gazette ran an article about it, too. 2. Back on Darwin’s birthday (12 February)Continue reading “Praise for Miki’s paper; TV show; ASM Distinguished Lectureship”

Some Good News to Start the Year

With two weeks remaining in winter, the season about to end has been actually been pretty good to us with the exception of the record-breaking 28″ dump last month. I can start by congratulating Josh Michener for landing an NRSA postdoctoral fellowship (and for his PNAS paper that emerged from his graduate work with Christina Smolke). It has also been quiteContinue reading “Some Good News to Start the Year”

MicrobialEvolution.org is a Go!

Today – Darwin’s 204th birthday – we are happy to “launch” in a more public way MicrobialEvolution.org. Thanks to the excellent work of Chris Engles, the site has been up and running, and I have finally managed to take the time to gather enough material from pestering a few colleagues that the point of the siteContinue reading “MicrobialEvolution.org is a Go!”

Latest News:

Remarkably, three more months have gone by since my last post. We have crowned a new Ph.D. from the lab, Dr. Nigel Delaney, back on 30 October. He gave a fantastic presentation concentrating on his new work estimating the distribution of fitness effects of successful mutations for one of our strains of Methylobacterium. He has now gottenContinue reading “Latest News:”

End of Summer Update.

In the past month and a half we’ve had four new papers come out. First is one led by myself and Stephane Vuilleumier in Journal of Bacteriology announcing the genome sequences of six strains of Methylobacterium. Second, Hsuan-Chao Chiu, his then-mentor Daniel Segre and I have a follow-up to last year’s Science paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that extends some general theory that considers how epistasisContinue reading “End of Summer Update.”

Comings and Goings, Grants, and Publications.

In the midst of a busy summer, we have had some comings, goings, new grant, and a new paper. We welcome Sherif Gerges as a visiting summer undergrad and Josh Michener as a new postdoc, fresh off his Caltech Ph.D. Unfortunately we had to give our best wishes to a few departing lab members: postdocsContinue reading “Comings and Goings, Grants, and Publications.”

Publication: “Diminishing Returns Epistasis Among Beneficial Mutations Decelerates Adaptation.”

3 June, 2011 – Our paper uncovering a generic trend for diminishing returns between beneficial mutations was published in today’s issue of Science. Besides an excellent perspective in the same issue by Kryazhimskiy et al. on our paper and that of our colleague, Tim Cooper (U. Houston), reporting the same finding in E. coli, stories were alsoContinue reading “Publication: “Diminishing Returns Epistasis Among Beneficial Mutations Decelerates Adaptation.””

New Website, New Publications.

At long last, we have done a make-over of our website. In terms of scientific output, since the Science paper last mentioned as news nearly a year ago, we’ve had publications in Cell (a Preview about a great paper from the group of Sander Tans), Cell Reports (David Chou uncovered a remarkable diversity of genetic pathways to parallel optimization of geneContinue reading “New Website, New Publications.”