Where did 2021 go? I often ask myself that question, but here we are half way through 2022. Despite time moving in odd ways, we have been slowly regaining a sense of normalcy and sciencing away as always! Here is a brief taste of what we’ve been up to:
Britt has spent the 2021/2022 academic year as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (https://www.wiko-berlin.de). Her sabbatical has afforded her some amazing opportunities to read, think, reflect, dream, and plan. She has been working on, among other things, two projects relating to how phage ecology and evolution are shaped by the host (meta)communities in which they exist and a theoretical exploration of how host immune systems are shaped by the microbiome over evolutionary timescales. More on both soon! Britt is also excited to announce that she was selected as a CZ Biohub Investigator (https://www.czbiohub.org/investigator-program/). The unrestricted funds provided by this initiative will allow the group to explore new high-risk ideas on how phages might shape host health in unexpected ways, and she is thrilled to join this exciting network of researchers.
New arrivals! The lab has grown a lot over the last year. We have welcomed Dominique Holtappels as a new postdoctoral researcher to lead the Pear Project. He arrived from KU Leuven, where he completed his PhD in Bio-science Engineering with Prof Rob Lavigne. His previous research focused on the challenges and opportunities of phage therapy in agriculture (see more here) and he is now taking on a large-scale project, funded by our NSF/USDA CAREER award, to better understand how phage host range is shaped by and shapes bacterial community dynamics. We are also welcoming new NSF postdoctoral Fellow Milo Johnson. Milo is joining us from Michael Desai‘s lab at Harvard, where he recently completed his PhD exploring the molecular evolution of yeast (see more here) and developed new and improved ways to visualize scientific data. At Berkeley, he will be developing new ways to understand neutral evolutionary processes that occur over the course of pathogen infection. We also had two new PhD students join the group in 2021: Asa Conover and Claire Evensen. Asa is joining us as a Berkeley Fellow most recently from the labs of Drs. Gregory Gilbert and Ingrid Parker at UC Santa Cruz, where he was working as a research technician. Prior to that, Asa graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Southern California with a BS in Biological Sciences, where he worked on projects ranging from hydrothermal vent effects on protist biogeography to stable isotope probing (SIP) experiments in diazotrophic marine cyanobacteria (see here). Claire joined the Boots lab as a Berkeley fellow in 2021, and will be co-advised by Britt on projects relating to the development and testing of new theory on factors that shape microbial coexistence. Claire received her BS in Biochemistry and Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and then completed her MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing at Oxford. You can check out her work here. Finally, we were incredibly lucky to welcome recent UCB graduate Julia Sherman as our new lab manager, and UCB grads Sara A. and Fernando Diaz as NSF REPs fellows!
New papers! Despite all of the setbacks from lockdown and other pandemic-related challenges, the group has been pushing forward with some awesome new results:
Mehlferber, E. C., McCue, K. F., Ferrel, J. E., Koskella, B., & Khanna, R. (2022). Temporally Selective Modification of the Tomato Rhizosphere and Root Microbiome by Volcanic Ash Fertilizer Containing Micronutrients. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, e00049-22.
Meyer, K. M., Porch, R., Muscettola, I. E., Vasconcelos, A. L. S., Sherman, J. K., Metcalf, C. J. E., Lindow, S. E. & Koskella, B. (2022). Plant neighborhood shapes diversity and reduces interspecific variation of the phyllosphere microbiome. The ISME journal, 1-12.
Dewald-Wang, E. A., Parr, N., Tiley, K., Lee, A., & Koskella, B. (2022). Multiyear time-shift study of bacteria and phage dynamics in the phyllosphere. The American Naturalist, 199(1), 126-140.
Debray, R., Herbert, R. A., Jaffe, A. L., Crits-Christoph, A., Power, M. E., & Koskella, B. (2021). Priority effects in microbiome assembly. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 1-13.
Debray, R., Socolar, Y., Kaulbach, G., Guzman, A., Hernandez, C. A., Curley, R., Dhond, A., Bowles, T. & Koskella, B. (2021). Water stress and disruption of mycorrhizas induce parallel shifts in phyllosphere microbiome composition. New Phytologist.
Koskella Lab at UC Berkeley 