About a recent paper from my lab: Julia S Ngo, Piyush Amitabh, Jonah G Sokoloff, Calvin Trinh, Travis J Wiles, Karen Guillemin, and Raghuveer Parthasarathy, “The Vibrio Type VI Secretion System Induces Intestinal Macrophage Redistribution and Enhanced Intestinal Motility,” mBio, (2024). A few years ago, my lab discovered that Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that cause … Continue reading A gut-wrenching tale of bacteria and immune cells
Our microbial ecology journal club, in addition to being fun and educational, is a limitless source of data presentation examples both wonderful and terrible. Here’s a recent example that drives me up the wall. It’s from a study [1] on correlations between pre-term births and various chemicals that may or may not be associated with … Continue reading When Should You Make a Plot of p-values? Never.
I decided to make a version of the abstract for my upcoming presentation at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society that (i) has a movie, and (ii) is revised slightly from the version I submitted a few months ago. My talk is one of two invited talks at a pair of focus sessions … Continue reading Bacterial behaviors and the physical landscape of the zebrafish gut [APS talk abstract]
Are there general laws governing the gut microbiome? This is an important question if we’re to make sense of how the microbial ecosystem inside each of us influences health and disease, without being overwhelmed by its diversity and complexity. It’s also the question that, almost verbatim, starts off a recent paper from my lab, … Continue reading Kepler, Newton, and Gut Microbes
This post is really just an update to the last one, on our recent paper on watching the growth of gut bacterial communities, but I thought I’d post separately that I just learned that we made the cover of mBio. (Or more accurately, the illustration I submitted is the “featured image” for this issue — … Continue reading A bacterial clock
(I wrote a shorter version of this post for the META Center blog, here.) A large fraction of my research group’s efforts are devoted to understanding the structure and dynamics of gut microbial communities — the multitude of microbes that we, like all animals, house in our digestive tracts. Our approach is a very direct … Continue reading Glimpses of Gut Microbes
Earlier this Fall, I was part of the University’s “DUKTalks” event — rather like TED talks but (i) featuring speakers from UO, and (ii) without the vast audience. It was a fun and interesting program, with fifteen minute talks on medieval runes, Facebook, and more. My talk, “The Physics of Life,” was about (unsurprisingly) biophysics. … Continue reading DUKTalks + Fish Guts
![Bacterial behaviors and the physical landscape of the zebrafish gut [APS talk abstract]](https://eighteenthelephant.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/light_sheet_lens_arrangement_oct2017.png?w=256&h=256&crop=1)
The Eighteenth Elephant 