Thread by @mikeblazanin

Excited to see my first ever first-author paper and the first chapter of my dissertation out now in @ISMEJournal!

We did an exhaustive review/synthesis of what is known about the effects of community context on bacteria-phage ecology and evolution (spoiler: not much)

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If you want a little more detail than a Twitter thread, you can check out a 'behind-the-paper' blog post we wrote here: naturemicrobiologycommunity.nature.com/posts/in-bacte…

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There has been a long history of studying bacteria and their viral symbionts, #bacteriophages. In #ecology and #evolution, they've been workhorse systems for studying host-parasite interactions for many years (3/n)

Yet when it comes to thinking about the biotic diversity of those studies, they've primarily been at two ends of the continuum: very simple (e.g experiments on a single bacteria-phage pair), or very complex (e.g. observations of natural communities) (4/n)

A young but growing number of papers have set out to close this gap with experiments in medium complexity communities, and it is those nine (just NINE!) papers that we focus our review on (5/n)

Generally, many of these experiments observed similar ecological effects of "community context" (presence of other bacterial species) (6/n)

E.g. nearly every study found that community context suppressed the densities of focal bacteria and phages. (although it had a wide array of effects on the ecological interaction *between* bacteria and phages, suggesting there's more going on than we might expect) (7/n)

In contrast, the studies found extremely divergent evolutionary effects of "community context" (presence of other bacterial species) (8/n)

E.g. some found that community diversity slowed the evolution or coevolution of bacteria and phages, others found no effect. (9/n)

Two really cool studies found that bacterial diversity could qualitatively change evolutionary outcomes. In one case favoring #CRISPR-based resistance (feat @EllinorAlseth et al), and in another case enabling phage host range expansion (feat @luisadesordi et al) (9/n)

And we also saw that community context could interact, or not interact, with #pleiotropy in a variety of ways (10/n)

In the end, we highlight the numerous open questions and unresolved areas in this emerging field, with the hope that more experiments can begin to reveal an emerging picture of how bacteria-phage ecology and evolution translates between simple experiments & natural systems (11/n)

You can find the paper itself here: nature.com/articles/s4139…

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(and if you find that paywalled, the nearly-identical pre-print version can be found here) ecoevorxiv.org/yux5q/

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Thanks to all those who willingly shared or made data publicly available for the synthesis portion of the paper! @EllinorAlseth, @edzewestra, Julia Johnke, @Achatzino, Rachel Mumford, @FrimanScience.

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