Priya's excellent work on quorum-sensing activation and coordination in Pseudomonas aeruginosa got published in Current Biology. Congratulations!

We have recently welcomed three new PhD students in our lab.

Daniela Rovito will investigate social interactions between ESKAPE pathogens, using both in-vivo and in vitro models, and how they could be exploited to help treat infections.

Simon Maréchal will work with bacterial communities isolated from the environment to explore the traits that determine community assembly and stability.

Sukrit Suresh will employ experimental evolution to elucidate interaction between pathogens over evolutionary time and under different stressful conditions.

Priya and Alex’s paper on quorum sensing evolution in Pseudomonas aeruginosa has been published in mSystems.
 Congratulations!!!

Subham Mridha's main PhD project on the coordination of siderophore gene expression got published in Communications Biology.

Subham's work on enforced specialization in siderophore production was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Congratulations Subham!

We are happy to welcome three new master students in our group.

Maria Muscalu is working with time-lapse fluorescence microscopy to assess the gene expression patterns involved in quorum sensing and will develop tools to facilitate single-cell image analysis.

Ove Mattmann works together with Dr. Subham Mridha and investigates the ability of prey species to develop resistance against predation by B. bacteriovorus.

Roger Kuratli will focus on the evolution of interaction networks among pathogens isolated from the lungs of children suffering from cystic fibrosis.

Over the last months, several new people joined our group:

Clémentine Laffont has joined our lab as a postdoctoral researcher. Her work will focus on the interactions between bacteria to experimentally test the “competition sensing” theory.

PhD Student Lukas Schwyter will work on the evolution of interaction networks among pathogens isolated from the lungs of children suffering from cystic fibrosis.

Flavie Roncoroni is doing her master thesis with us, and will examine how siderophore treatment affects selection for antibiotic resistance.

Xuedi Huang is a visiting student from China and is currently studying the evolution of pyoverdin receptors.

We are happy to welcome you all to the group!

Our work on the dual role of siderophores as public goods or public bads was published in Ecology Letters.
Congratulations to all involved!

We've recently uploaded a fresh batch of preprints! 

1. in a work led by Priya Jayakumar, we show that individual bacterial cells take different amounts of time to "turn on" their quorum-sensing systems, and a group-level response is obtained progressively, rather than immediately. This work is fruit of a collaboration with Stephen Thomas and Sam Brown from Georgia Tech.

2. In a work led by Alex Figueiredo and Özhan Özkaya, we show that siderophore cross-use (or lack thereof) may be a very important predictor of bacterial invasion outcomes. This work is also Jos's debut as a last author in an experimental paper. 

3. Subham Mridha's work with bacterial cells "specializing" in different siderophores suggests that this specialization leads to cross-cheating, and not divison of labour!

4. Finally, in Selina Niggli's work on interspecific interactions between P. aeruginosa and S. aureus, we surprisingly found that the latter can often outcompete the former on solid surfaces!