The O'Brien Lab

Paper in Science!

Work led by Rebecca T Batstone shows that microbes evolve to benefit local hosts. One neat aspect of our work is that benefits occurred because loci increasing microbe fitness on local hosts also increased the fitness of local hosts – e.g. microbes were neither “altruistic” nor “cheaters.” Indeed alleles underlying mutual benefits more commonly contributed to evolved microbial differences for host and microbe growth than expected by chance.
See article: Experimental evolution makes microbes more cooperative with their local host genotype


Hear Rebecca discuss the results

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Anna quoted in the Christian Science Monitor