Microbial Population Biology

This is an odd but temporarily convenient place to put this schedule. The MCBS seminar schedule for the remainder of Fall 2008 is as follows:
Tuesdays
Oct. 28 Erin Allgood “The effect of diet and polybrominated diphenyl ether exposure on whole body and adipocyte metabolism in male Wistar rats”
Nov. 4 Cliff Rosen
Nov. 11 Veteran’s Day [...]

Kinda cool: see http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/74/14/4256
Spontaneous Deletion of a 209-Kilobase-Pair Fragment from the Escherichia coli Genome Occurs with Acquisition of Resistance to an Assortment of Infectious Phages
Yasunori Tanji,* Kenji Hattori, Kohichi Suzuki, and Kazuhiko Miyanaga

This exchange is a small fraction of the commentary following Rich Lenski’s recent PNAS article (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0803151105) but perhaps the funniest.
Enjoy!
http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Lenski_affair
Please comment here or there if some of this makes you smile

Richard Lenski (along with Zachary Blount and Chris Borland) has just published his inaugural article in PNAS describing the evolution of the ability to grow on citrate in one of the long-term lines, which is interesting not only because it took ~30,000 generations to acquire this huge advantage, but also because this is a decidedly [...]

I had hoped to find a paper that would allow us to comment directly on the article via the PLOS open discussion system, which is much like our blog. However, failing this for now I must assign a paper that appeared in Science last year.
See: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5815/1126
The PDF can be found here:
http://micropopbio.org/cooper/2008/05/04/comparing-microbial-communities-to-understand-rules-for-their-assembly/
PS: I am [...]

The motility and growth curve data from your environmental isolates are in, and they can be found here:
micr-713-2008-growth-curves.xls
713-swim-and-swarm-motility-spring-2008.xls

With this spreadsheet, you now have enough data to figure out who is the lucky winner of the grand prize for the second running of the Bacterial Tri(quad)athlon. The prize can be picked from the following site: http://www.giantmicrobes.com.
Your [...]

On 4/24 and today I showed slides describing some of the body of theory on the evolution of virulence. These slides are here: http://micropopbio.org/files/2007/12/713-lecture-9-evol-of-virulence.ppt
I also presented results from my old paper with Paul Ewald:
http://micropopbio.org/cooper/files/2007/11/cooper-et-al-2002-proc-r-soc.pdf
You all presented very interesting papers as riffs on the theme of why virulence might evolve. Please post these articles [...]

All,
Nice job on choosing papers.  Here is a summary of what I heard.  Please comment on this post to add to, correct, or question my brief overview.
All readings can be found at:
http://micropopbio.org/cooper/2008/04/17/student-chosen-readings-for-evolution-of-community-structure-in-space-or-time/
In chronological order of publication,
1) Dave, who chose Bull JJ Molineaux IJ, Rice WR. 1991. Selection of benevolence in a host-parasite system.  Evolution 45:875-82.
They [...]

To do this week:
1) Many of your blogs are becoming woefully out of date.  Please post 1) on Turner et al phi6, and specifically your likes/dislikes of these designs, and 2) on your digest of the Velicer et al. Myxo article that you chose to present on Thursday.   Please do so ASAP.
2) Please read the [...]

Check out the latest blog on mutation by Olivia Judson: http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/
Last week, she talked about the poorly studied, rare group of mutations that are beneficial, and this week, she talks about the potential for mutational hotspots.  As always, it’s written very well and for the public.
Also, check out this wacky study: the airborne microbial metagenome, [...]