Two papers led by Will Harcombe – one in PNAS – on cooperation in synthetic communities

In the past months we have had two papers on the E. coli–S. enterica system that Will Harcombe developed, and worked on when he was a postdoc in the lab.

One of these (Hynes et al., 2018. Biomedical Physics and Engineering Express) reports the ability to examine communities via bioprinting, and also represented a collaboration with two of my best friends Daniel Segrè and Nate Cady.

The second of these (Harcombe et al., 2018. PNAS) just came out a few weeks ago online in PNAS. It describes Will’s amazing finding of bidirectional costly mutualism evolving between species in the lab. Repeatedly E. coli evolved to break its own metabolism to excrete galactose to S. enterica during growth together on lactose (which S. enterica can’t use) in order to obtain methionine, which S. enterica had previously evolved to produce in return. I was excited to discover that, just a couple days ago, PNAS published a commentary on our paper penned by Jennifer Farrell and Sam Brown.