A few new papers from the lab

(1) The microbiome beyond the horizon of ecological and evolutionary theory published in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Britt’s coauthors, Jess Metcalf from Princeton and Lindsay Hall from the Quadrum Institute set out to ask where current evolutionary and ecological theory might fall short when being applied to microbiome research. It was a very challenging and fun piece to write! (found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0340-2).

(2) Phd Student, Norma Morella, and Britt took a stab at figuring out what we might learn about the interaction between the immune system and the microbiome by looking across systems. This short opinion piece certainly got us thinking, and emphasized that there is still a lot of work to be done (The Value of a Comparative Approach to Understand the Complex Interplay between Microbiota and Host Immunity can be found here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2017.01114/full).

(3) In collaboration with Derek Lin and Henry Lin in the Department of Medicine at University of New Mexico, we recently examined the promise of phage therapy and its complex history.  (Phage therapy: An alternative to antibiotics in the age of multi-drug resistance can be found here: chttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5547374/).

(4) As part of a large theoretical undertaking, Britt was coauthor on a paper examining when and how you can generate frequency dependent selection in host-parasite coevolution without the strict specificity for infection that is typically built into models. This work suggests that fluctuating selection (important in many theories, including the Red Queen Hypothesis for the maintenance of sex) might be far more common than predicted based on infection genetic mechanisms. Paper can be found here: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1866/20171615

Also, if you’re interested, Britt partook in a QandA for Current Biology about everything from her career to the future of science. More here: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(17)31395-7.pdf