Alex Betts

TL;DR: A modeling framework that integrates dynamic flux balance analysis with diffusion on a lattice and applied to engineered communities predicted and experimentally confirmed the species ratio to which a two-species mutualistic consortium converges and the equilibrium composition of a newly engineered three-member community.

TL;DR: The results indicate that microbes living within a host may make the evolutionary transition to mutualism in response to pathogen attack, and that microbiome evolution warrants consideration as a driver of infection outcome.

TL;DR: Increase in parasite diversity drove shifts in the mode of selection from fluctuating (Red Queen) dynamics to predominately directional (arms race) dynamics, which caused faster molecular evolution within host populations and greater genetic divergence among populations.

TL;DR: It is suggested that coevolutionary dynamics are associated with the nature of the receptor used by the phage for infection, and have practical application in the control of bacterial pathogens through the evolutionary training of phages, increasing their virulence and efficacy as therapeutics or disinfectants.

TL;DR: This work combines phenomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics to study the fitness effects produced by a collection of diverse plasmids in the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1, and shows that plasmid alter the expression of a common set of metabolic genes in PAO2, and produce convergent changes in host cell metabolism.