William R. Harcombe

The paper shows that cross-feeding between bacteria changes how antibiotic combinations affect growth, shifting interactions toward antagonism due to metabolic feedbacks.

The paper investigates how motility affects cross-feeding mutualisms between E. coli and S. enterica, finding that spatial structure and metabolic dynamics determine the selective advantage of motility.

The paper develops a theory linking cell geometry, membrane protein crowding, and metabolic traits in E. coli, validated through experimental data.

This study develops a mathematical framework to predict how temperature affects pairwise interactions among heterotrophic microbes, revealing that interactions are more thermally sensitive than metabolic traits and show systematic temperature-dependent changes.

This study investigates how obligate intracellular parasites alter microbial community composition through metabolic remodeling in an in vitro system.

The paper models how growth rate affects selection for costly toxin production in microbes, finding stronger selection at higher growth rates in spatially-structured environments.

The paper uses CRISPRi to predict synergistic antibiotic targets in E. coli by testing gene co-repression and identifying novel interactions.

The paper tests how environmental conditions affect the fitness of microbial consortia with different metabolite exchange strategies, finding that a lactic acid-exchanging consortium outperformed wild type under weakly buffered conditions but not under highly buffered conditions.

The paper shows phage can have indirect effects on microbial communities, with outcomes depending on metabolic and evolutionary factors.

The paper engineers a genetic barrier to sexual reproduction by using programmable transcription factors to induce lethal gene expression in hybrid offspring.