It's been a busy 6 months - my job contract is up in August and I'm trying to push as many projects out the door as possible. Whilst I was a bit hesitant to use preprints at first, a recent experience where a paper was in review for over a year in total (don't ask what the end result was) , made me realize that life - and academic contracts - are too short to wait for the peer review process. So I've fully embraced letting everyone see my typos and have four preprints published over the last few weeks. Two are from the Kalahari meerkat project, one led by me quantifying within-individual stability of meerkat gut microbiomes over long and short time periods (spoiler - they are ridiculously dynamic, but they are relatively stable over weeks and months, and do stabilize some with age, and some taxa like Bacteroidetes genera are rather individualized; https://ecoevorxiv.org/dsqfr/) . The second is led by my colleague Nadine Müller-Klein, who has gone through every meerkat record to quantify when each meerkat started showing signs of TB disease. TB disease has swept through the population over the last two decades, and it's unclear whether it was introduced to the population relatively recently, or whether climate change (which is scarily evident in this region) has made them more vulnerable to disease. Nadine shows that mortality from TB is higher than previously estimated and that the vast majority of the monitored population have been socially exposed to the pathogen - and possibly carry latent infection. Check it out here: https://t.ly/pryT.
The other two have been awesome to work on because they have been side projects and non-meerkaty (I love meerkats but variety is the spice of life). One is something completely different from what I normally do - bacteria-plasmid interactions in wastewater, working mainly with Dirk Sanders and Thibault Stalder. Plasmids are little circular bits of DNA that can be transferred between bacteria and are key agents of horizontal gene transfer (eg of AMR genes). I didn't know much about plasmids before this project but now I think they are really key to microbial evolution and definitely want to keep working on them. In this study we took advantage of some nifty (and expensive) new technology that identifies DNA sourced from the same cell to work out how plasmids are distributed across bacterial hosts in a waste water sample, then tested whether plasmids with AMR genes were more likely to be connected to more bacterial hosts than plasmids without AMR genes. They were. Paper here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.11.491481v1. Last one is a review. In the Nat Comms paper we published last year, we found really crazy diurnal rhythms in the meerkat gut microbiome. When I tell people, they are super skeptical about it. So I decided we needed to get a review out there to show this phenomenon is real, and actually a really important part of gut microbiome function. Record the time of day people! If you're interested in circadian rhythms in general, link is here: DOI: 10.22541/au.165244698.86280644 And keep tuned for some really cool meerkat research that hopefully should be out as a preprint pretty soon looking at long-term shifts in the gut microbiota over two decades.
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