Megan G. Behringer

This study shows how fluctuating environments shape genetic interactions in E. coli by selecting for mutations in transport genes that exhibit environment-dependent epistasis and improve fitness across feast and famine conditions.

This study engineers obligate anaerobic bacteria to tolerate oxygen, improving their survival in the gut.

This study compares mutation accumulation in bacterial monocultures and cocultures, finding that cross-feeding can limit rather than promote metabolic dependencies.

This study shows how ETBF reprograms host metabolism to create an oxidative niche that supports its growth in the inflamed gut.

The paper develops a Bayesian framework for longitudinal RB-TnSeq to analyze fitness dynamics in fluctuating environments and identifies a 'fitness seascape' model that predicts mutational targets.

This study shows that initial mutations can constrain adaptive diversification in structured environments, highlighting the role of genotype-by-environment interactions in evolutionary outcomes.

This study measures mutation rates and spectra in anaerobic lactic acid bacteria over 1000 generations, revealing elevated rates and transition biases, with novel mutation dynamics in specific species.

The paper shows that repeated moderate starvation promotes co-existence of bacterial ecotypes in cross-feeding populations, supporting cooperation and diversity maintenance.

The paper identifies an Arg to His mutation in Rho that enables E. coli to adapt to fluctuating pH during starvation by altering transcription termination and pH homeostasis.

This study finds no whole-chromosome dosage compensation or global transcriptomic differences in aneuploid yeast lines, but detects gene-level expression attenuation and mutation accumulation effects.

The paper generates genomes for three bioluminescent beetles to study the genetic basis of bioluminescence and finds at least two independent evolutionary origins of the trait.