I could not be more grateful for having such lovely examiners in @jpjhall and @ZaminIqbal and moreover the best lab group ever with the @TaylorLabGroup. 4 years has fully converted me to a die hard phage lover 🦠🧬👩‍🔬.

RT @ShaniUPAli: Had a great time at #CHRO2024 !Grateful to be able to present on campy aerotolerance alongside great talks from @Benizao an….

RT @PinkPetri: I am SO excited to announce that I have finally opened a microbiology jewellery shop! If you've ever seen me at conferences….

It's been a huge learning curve to take this paper from abstract discussion, through many revisions, to a real publication out in the world, and I can’t thank my colleagues – both those on this paper and many others not – enough for all the support and help during this process!.

However, without imposing extra costs for mutating the phage receptor, and against a single, lytic phage, we see that something as simple as the difference in the frequencies of phage resistant cells can predict selection for a CRISPR-Cas system. 10/10.

This paper is a nice piece of the puzzle to understand how cells that acquire CRISPR-Cas systems via horizontal gene transfer might be selected for in mixed populations, although of course real ecological situations will be a lot more complicated. 9/10.

Over a short 24-hour experiment, the change in population frequency behaved as predicted by the mathematical model! The strains with a CRISPR-Cas system were selected for in the total population when f∆ was positive (>1) and not selected for when f∆ was negative (<1). 8/10

We followed the relative strain frequency with qPCR with initial set ups of either: a higher frequency of cells in the population with CRISPR-Cas had phage resistance (f∆ >1), or the population lacking CRISPR-Cas had the higher frequency of phage resistant cells (f∆<1). 7/10.

As it can be a tricky to tag & track 5 different phenotypes of cells that are identical apart from possession of CRISPR-Cas systems or mutations in their phage receptors, we inserted a very short nonsense region into each strain’s genome and targeted that with qPCR primers. 6/10.

(E.g. as you might find in a situation where a small subpopulation recently gained a CRISPR-Cas system via horizontal gene transfer). We also wanted to test this experimentally, so we used Pseudomonas aeruginosa and its obligately lytic phage DMS3vir as our model. 5/10.

We called the difference between the frequencies of the populations showing phage resistance f∆. This holds even if the population lacking CRISPR-Cas is larger the population with a CRISPR-Cas system. 4/10.

E.g. if 30% of population with CRISPR-Cas has some kind of phage resistance (CRISPR-Cas immunity/phage receptor mutation) & the population lacking CRISPR-Cas has 15% phage resistance (phage receptor mutation) then the population with CRISPR-Cas will be selected for. 3/10.

David & Sylvain built a deterministic mathematical model & found that when 2 populations of bacteria, one with, one without a CRISPR-Cas system meet, the difference in the frequencies of cells with phage defences in each population determines which population is selected for 2/10

Excited to share my 1st paper along with @drbridgetwatson @TaylorLabGroup @edzewestra Sylvain Gandon and David McLeod where we asked “when would using a defence system (CRISPR-Cas) be selectively advantageous over mutations that block phage binding?” 1/10.

For anyone in Montreal at #Evol2024 come say hi at my poster on what happens if a humble bacterial cell horizontally acquires itself a nice shiny new CRISPR-cas system. Today's poster session I1.

RT @TaylorLabGroup: 🚨 JOB ALERT 🚨 .Join the @Multi_Defence consortium as a postdoctoral researcher within my lab @UniofBath. The project w….

RT @SWBio_DTP: Time goes so quickly. and before we know it we will shortly be saying goodbye to our cohort of 2020! 👋. Of course we had t….

RT @elliemjarvis: Really exciting to see my article about public engagement here in the Life Sciences Department published today! Featuring….

RT @ShaniUPAli: Thank you to @MicrobioSoc for letting me present a flash talk on my PhD work. If five minutes of me talking about campy evo….

Thank you for getting the action shot of my poster presentation Tiff 😂.