Tag: Marcus Wenne

Welcome Vi and Marcus

I am very happy to share with you that our two doctoral students funded by the Wallenberg DDLS initiative have now started. One of them – Marcus Wenne – is already a well-known figure in the lab, as he has been with us as a master student and then as a bioinformatician for more than a year. The other student – Vi Varga – is a completely new face in the lab and just started yesterday.

Marcus will work in a project on global environmental AMR. He will also continue on his work on large-scale metagenomics to understand community dynamics and antibiotic resistance selection in microbial communities subjected to antibiotics selection. Marcus will work very closely to EMBARK and continue the important work we have done in that project over the next four years.

Vi will study responses of microbial communities to change, with a particular focus on comparative genomics and transcriptional approaches. We will link this to both community stability, pathogenesis and resistance to antibiotics, so this project involves a little bit of everything in terms of the lab’s research interests. Vi’s background is in comparative genomics and pathogenesis, so this seems to be the perfect mix to be able to carry out this project successfully!

Very welcome to the lab Marcus and Vi! We look forward to work with you for the next four years or so!

March 2021 Pod: Antibiotic resistance evolution

In this episode Microbiology Lab Pod, the team (Johan Bengtsson-Palme, Emil Burman, Anna Abramova, Marcus Wenne, Sebastian Wettersten and Mahbuba Lubna Akter, Shumaila Malik, Emilio Rudbeck and Camille Wuyts) discusses the evolution of antibiotic resistance from different perspectives. We also interview Rémi Gschwind about his work on novel antibiotic resistance genes in the EMBARK program.

The specific papers discussed in the pod (with approximate timings) are as follows:

  • 7:45 – EMBARK website: http://antimicrobialresistance.eu
  • 26:15 – Seemann, T., 2014. Prokka: rapid prokaryotic genome annotation. Bioinformatics 30, 2068–2069. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btu153
  • 29:00 – Bengtsson-Palme, J., Larsson, D.G.J., 2015. Antibiotic resistance genes in the environment: prioritizing risks. Nature reviews Microbiology 13, 396. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro3399-c1
  • 29:30 – Ebmeyer, S., Kristiansson, E., Larsson, D.G.J., 2021. A framework for identifying the recent origins of mobile antibiotic resistance genes. Communications Biology 4. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-020-01545-5
  • 54:15 – Gillings, M.R., Stokes, H.W., 2012. Are humans increasing bacterial evolvability? Trends in Ecology & Evolution 27, 346–352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2012.02.006
  • 55:15 – Woods, L.C., et al., 2020. Horizontal gene transfer potentiates adaptation by reducing selective constraints on the spread of genetic variation. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 117, 26868–26875. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2005331117
  • 76:15 – Card, K.J., Thomas, M.D., Graves, J.L., Barrick, J.E., Lenski, R.E., 2021. Genomic evolution of antibiotic resistance is contingent on genetic background following a long-term experiment with Escherichia coli. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 118, e2016886118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016886118

The podcast was recorded on March 18, 2021. If you want to reach out to us with comments, suggestions, or other feedback, please send an e-mail to podcast at microbiology dot se or contact @bengtssonpalme via Twitter. The music that can be heard on the pod is composed by Johan Bengtsson-Palme and is taken from the album Cafe Phonocratique.

February 2021 Pod: Global Change

The Microbiology Lab Pod is back with season two. This first episode was recorded on February 4 and has the theme of global change and effects on microbes. The crew (Johan Bengtsson-Palme, Emil Burman, Anna Abramova, Marcus Wenne, Sebastian Wettersten and Mahbuba Lubna Akter) is joined by two guests – Shumaila Malik and Emilio Rudbeck – and talks about the lab’s most recent publication, the one-year covid anniversary, the effects of global warming and other global change factors on soil microbial communities, and thawing permafrost.

The specific papers discussed in the pod (with approximate timings) are as follows:

  • 5:45 – Abramova, A., Osińska, A., Kunche, H., Burman, E., Bengtsson-Palme, J., 2021. CAFE: a software suite for analysis of paired-sample transposon insertion sequencing data. Bioinformatics. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa1086
  • 8:00 – Bengtsson, J., et al., 2011. Metaxa: a software tool for automated detection and discrimination among ribosomal small subunit (12S/16S/18S) sequences of archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes, mitochondria, and chloroplasts in metagenomes and environmental sequencing datasets. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 100, 471–475. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-011-9598-6
  • 29:30 – Donhauser, J., Niklaus, P.A., Rousk, J., Larose, C., Frey, B., 2020. Temperatures beyond the community optimum promote the dominance of heat-adapted, fast growing and stress resistant bacteria in alpine soils. Soil Biology and Biochemistry 148, 107873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soilbio.2020.107873
  • 54:30 – Zhou, Z., Wang, C., Luo, Y., 2020. Meta-analysis of the impacts of global change factors on soil microbial diversity and functionality. Nat Commun 11, 3072. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16881-7
  • 60:45 – Bahram, M., et al., 2018. Structure and function of the global topsoil microbiome. Nature 320, 1039. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0386-6
  • 68:15 – Lozano, G.L., et al., 2019. Introducing THOR, a Model Microbiome for Genetic Dissection of Community Behavior. mBio 10. https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.02846-18
  • 70:15 – Bengtsson-Palme, J., 2020. Microbial model communities: To understand complexity, harness the power of simplicity. Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal 18, 3987–4001. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2020.11.043
  • 72:00 – Sajjad, W., et al., 2020. Resurrection of inactive microbes and resistome present in the natural frozen world: Reality or myth? Science of The Total Environment 735, 139275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.139275
  • 74:00 – Yashina, S., et al., 2012. Regeneration of whole fertile plants from 30,000-y-old fruit tissue buried in Siberian permafrost. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, 4008–4013. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1118386109
  • 74:30 – Pikuta, E.V., et al., 2005. Carnobacterium pleistocenium sp. nov., a novel psychrotolerant, facultative anaerobe isolated from permafrost of the Fox Tunnel in Alaska. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology 55, 473–478. https://doi.org/10.1099/ijs.0.63384-0
  • 75:00 – Bidle, K.D., Lee, S., Marchant, D.R., Falkowski, P.G., 2007. Fossil genes and microbes in the oldest ice on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, 13455–13460. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702196104
  • 75:15 – Timofeev, V., et al., 2019. Insights from Bacillus anthracis strains isolated from permafrost in the tundra zone of Russia. PLoS ONE 14, e0209140. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209140
  • 83:15 – Bengtsson-Palme, J., Boulund, F., Fick, J., Kristiansson, E., Larsson, D.G.J., 2014. Shotgun metagenomics reveals a wide array of antibiotic resistance genes and mobile elements in a polluted lake in India. Frontiers in microbiology 5, 648. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2014.00648
  • 84:00 – Bengtsson-Palme, J., Larsson, D.G.J., 2015. Antibiotic resistance genes in the environment: prioritizing risks. Nature reviews Microbiology 13, 396. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro3399-c1

The podcast was recorded on February 4, 2021. If you want to reach out to us with comments, suggestions, or other feedback, please send an e-mail to podcast at microbiology dot se or contact @bengtssonpalme via Twitter. The music that can be heard on the pod is composed by Johan Bengtsson-Palme and is taken from the album Cafe Phonocratique.

Welcome Mahbuba, Sebastian and Marcus

The fall is here and with it comes the arrival of three new group members. This fall, we are joined by Mahbuba Lubna, Sebastian Wettersten and Marcus Wenne. All three are master students from the University of Gothenburg and they will work on very different things.

Mahbuba will work together with Emil Burman on genes responsible for invasion in microbial communities (primarily THOR), expanding on Emil’s work and testing new and existing candidate genes in a wider diversity of conditions.

Sebastian will work on improving Metaxa2, making its classifications better and also enabling even better automation of database creation. Hopefully this will increase the pace of the Metaxa2 development, which has been stagnating a bit over the last two years.

Marcus, finally, will work together with Anna Abramova on analysing antibiotic resistance in a huge metagenomic dataset previously generated in the lab.

This means that we are now seven people in the lab (so if it weren’t for the covid-associated work from home recommendations, it would start to get crowded…) We welcome our three new members and look forward to an exciting fall!