J. L. Weissman

Functional biogeography of marine microbial heterotrophs

The paper synthesizes genetic data with a marine ecosystem model to analyze functional biogeography of marine heteroprokaryotes, identifying key ecological factors shaping their distribution.

Symbiotic diazotrophic UCYN-A strains co-occurred with El Niño, relaxed upwelling, and varied eukaryotes over 10 years off Southern California Bight

The paper examines UCYN-A symbioses over 10 years, finding increased UCYN-A1 abundance post-El Niño and associations with dinoflagellates and varying hosts.

NetGAM: Using generalized additive models to improve the predictive power of ecological network analyses constructed using time-series data

This study introduces a generalized additive model (GAM) to remove time-series signals from ecological data, improving the accuracy of inferred ecological networks.

Estimating maximal microbial growth rates from cultures, metagenomes, and single cells via codon usage patterns

This paper develops a method to estimate microbial maximal growth rates using codon usage patterns and applies it to over 200,000 genomes, revealing biases in culture collections towards fast-growing organisms.

Immune Lag Is a Major Cost of Prokaryotic Adaptive Immunity During Viral Outbreaks

The paper shows that immune lag during viral outbreaks is costly for prokaryotes, even for completely immune hosts, by analyzing host-virus dynamics.

Linking high GC content to the repair of double strand breaks in prokaryotic genomes

The paper links high GC content in prokaryotic genomes to the repair of double-strand breaks via the non-homologous end joining pathway, suggesting GC content may be an adaptive response to repair needs.

Ecology Shapes Microbial Immune Strategy: Temperature and Oxygen as Determinants of the Incidence of CRISPR Adaptive Immunity

The paper develops a predictive model of CRISPR incidence in bacteria and archaea using phylogenetically-corrected machine learning, revealing ecological drivers like temperature and oxygen levels.

Selective maintenance of multiple CRISPR arrays across prokaryotes

The paper investigates why prokaryotes maintain multiple CRISPR arrays, proposing a tradeoff between memory span and learning speed as a selective mechanism.

Immune Loss as a Driver of Coexistence During Host-Phage Coevolution

The paper shows that immune loss in bacteria can lead to stable coexistence with phages, contrasting with fitness tradeoffs, through theoretical and experimental analysis of CRISPR-Cas systems.