Lucy M. McCully Espinosa, PhD @microMcCully

(she/they) Bisexual binational bicyclist 🇲🇽 🏳️‍🌈 Microbiologist. Post-doc in Baym Lab finding lil phage friends. PhD work on 🦠 bacterial interactions 🧫 lucymccully.weebly.com Joined February 2013

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Kepler Mears @KeplerMears

7 months ago

My scientific career changed the day I met Fernando and my faith in science restored. In a world dominated by sequencing and LLMs, this project shows how much biology is hidden in plain sight waiting for the right person to make the connection, a must read!

Fernando Rossine @fernpizza

7 months ago

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Akos Nyerges @AkosNyerges

7 months ago

Interested in microbial evolution and plasmid population dynamics? Check out this fantastic preprint from Fernando @fernpizza & Michael @baym!

Fernando Rossine @fernpizza

7 months ago

Interested in microbial evolution and plasmid population dynamics? Check out this fantastic preprint from Fernando @fernpizza & Michael @baym!

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Sebastian S. Cocioba🪄🌷 @ATinyGreenCell

7 months ago

Fernando cooked.

Fernando Rossine @fernpizza

7 months ago

Fernando cooked. https://t.co/1OfTfjD75q

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Marc Lipsitch @mlipsitch

9 months ago

Excited to share a new preprint led by Indra Gonzalez Ojeda on a new tool to improve pangenome calling in bacteria, CLARC. biorxiv.org/content/10.110… . Passing output of Roary for S. pneumoniae populations through this tool reduces accessory genome > 30%, resolves other puzzles

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Fernando Rossine @fernpizza

7 months ago

Side quest: We needed precise control on the activation of the recombinase. We hypothesized that the FLP recombinase from the patagonian ancestor of the lager yeast would be thermosensitive (Lagers are cold brewed). It worked on the first attempt! (6/n)

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Fernando Rossine @fernpizza

7 months ago

@baym Here we show that within-cell competition is key to plasmid evolution. Link to the paper! (2/n) biorxiv.org/content/early/…

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Fernando Rossine @fernpizza

7 months ago

So happy that I can finally share the results of my first postdoc paper with @baym!! Turns out plasmids are an amazing system to study multi-scale evolution and we can track within-cell and between-cell dynamics! Here’s a photo of plasmids competing inside cells in a colony (1/n)

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Michael Baym @baym

2 years ago

Come learn about the latest work from my lab, lead by @nquinoneso and @implosian. It's an exploration of some truly weird phages that parasitize horizontal gene transfer!

Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

Come learn about the latest work from my lab, lead by @nquinoneso and @implosian. It's an exploration of some truly weird phages that parasitize horizontal gene transfer!

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Siân Owen @implosian

2 years ago

Delighted to finally release this preprint into the universe! This project has been a true labour of love the past few years for Natalia and me. I'm so excited to continue exploring the exciting world of phages that depend on conjugative plasmids!

Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

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Lucy M. McCully Espinosa, PhD @microMcCully

2 years ago

My greatest contribution to science is making sure the phages I found for @nquinoneso and @implosian's phenomenal paper had the most goth names I could conjure 🖤

Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

My greatest contribution to science is making sure the phages I found for @nquinoneso and @implosian's phenomenal paper had the most goth names I could conjure 🖤

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Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

This project has been a blast! What’s up with these strange phages? What does all of this mean for plasmid conjugation? And what other overlooked treasures await to be found in this world of mobile genetics elements? Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for our next adventures.

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Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

Finally, we revisited the phages that depend on the F plasmid. We found members of all the known groups, and even a completely new, tailed(!) plasmid-dependent phage! @microMcCully here, introducing the wonderful FtMidnight, showing there’s even more diversity to be found! 13/

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Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

If they are so abundant, why haven’t we heard about them from metagenomic studies? Well, we think they’re just not getting through. They seem hard to recover even from samples where we know they are present at high abundance. 12/

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Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

These phages have zero accessory genome, and exactly the same gene content, but they can differ by a large number of SNPs. These ones, for example, only differ by ~500 SNPs, but they can have strikingly different host preferences! Look: 11/

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Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

There were so many, that we were worried about finding names for all of them, so we decided to go for “PRD” + a color name. We have some wonderful ones like PRDchartreuse, PRDaquamarine, and my favorite: PRDcerulean 😊. 10/

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Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

All the phages we were finding belong to the Tectiviridae family, and are closely related to PRD1. Not only were we finding them in large amounts but also, in more diversity than all the previously isolated phages of this group. 9/

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Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

Why? Well, because they had A LOT of plasmid-dependent phages. Like, in wastewater(!) there are almost as many plasmid-dependent phages as E. coli phages, and way more than S. enterica or P. putida phages (the hosts we were using in our assay.) 8/

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Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

So we started screening as many samples as we could, looking for phages that depend on IncP conjugative plasmids (like RP4). This is @implosian and me, showing off our samples. Our favorite samples: compost and wastewater. 7/

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Natalia Quinones-Olvera @nquinoneso

2 years ago

This sounds almost too easy to be true, but it works! Since the determinant of phage susceptibility can be horizontally transferred 🤯, many of these phages have a broad host range. If we add fluorescence to it, it’s even easier to see, and we get Phage DisCo! 🪩 6/