Nels and Vincent explain how homology searches of anti-phage systems in eukaryotic genomes can be used to discover proteins of the human immune system.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Human antiviral effectors from antiphage systems (Cell Host Micro)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – Pathoplexus.org
Vincent – Can science cure its addiction to plastic?

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Nels and Vincent look at how plant prickles, sharp epidermal projections that provide defense from predators and other advantages, arose by convergent evolution, the emergence of analogous traits in distantly related species.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Convergent evolution of plant prickles (Science)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – Trees as a metaphor to understand relationships in biology
Vincent – Project 2025 vs. The Public’s Health

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Nels and Vincent discuss the genome sequence of an ancient wooly mammoth, which shows that the three-dimensional architecture of the DNA can persist after 50,000 years.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Three dimensional architecture of 50,000 year old wooly mammoth genome (Cell)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – Mysterious SARS-CoV-2 variants showing up in sewer samples
Vincent – ‘Cocaine sharks’ found in waters off Brazil

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Nels and Vincent explore a direct experimental test of Ohno’s Hypothesis, which states that gene duplication can help genes tolerate new mutations and thus facilitates the evolution of new phenotypes.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Direct test of Ohno’s Hypothesis (eLive)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – Experimental Evolution and the Nature of Biodiversity
Vincent – Is science’s dominant funding model broken?

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Nels and Vincent explain how deep genomics of macroalgae illuminate multiple paths to aquatic, photosynthetic multicellularity.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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Links for this episode

• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Paths to aquatic, photosynthetic multicellularity (Mol Plant)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – 12-sided Roman relic baffles archaeologists, spawns countless theories
Vincent – TWiEVO 11: Microbial accomplices in multicellularity and the follow up Synergistic Cues from Diverse Bacteria Enhance Multicellular Development in a Choanoflagellate

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Nels and Vincent review the genetic basis for tail-loss evolution in humans and apes.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Genetic basis of tail loss evolution in apes (Nature)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – Will Brie and Camembert Cheeses Go Extinct?
Vincent – A True Human Tail in a Neonate: Case report and literature review

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Nels and Vincent reveal how electric organ discharge from the electric eel facilitates the introduction of DNA into teleost larvae.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Electric eel discharge moves DNA into cells (Peer J)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – “The Jump” quilt by Cristina Arcenegui Bono
Vincent – T4 bacteriophage art object and Gwenbeads Etsy shop

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Rich Condit joins Nels and Vincent at the Science Mill in Johnson City, Texas, where Director of STEM Education Jeehyun Park talks about the goals of the childrens’ museum.

Hosts: Nels Elde, Vincent Racaniello, and Rich Condit

Guest: Jeehyun Park

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• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• The Science Mill
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – Science Mill: More Than a Museum and Elde Lab Video
Rich – The Moon May Get Its Own Time Zone (Claire Fahy, NYT 3/7/2023)
Vincent – SXSW Session “From Adversary to Ally: Reimagining Viruses as Medicines“

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Nels and Vincent discuss how behavioural individuality determines infection risk in clonal ant colonies.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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Links for this episode

• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Infection risk in clonal ant colonies (Nat Comm)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – Fungi (lichens) in Space
Vincent – Polar bear energetic and behavioral strategies on land with implications for surviving the ice-free period

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Nels and Vincent review a study of the key processes required for the different stages of fungal carnivory by a nematode-trapping fungus.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Fungal carnivory by a nematode-trapping fungus (Plos Biol)
• Timestamps by Jolene

Science Picks

Nels – Openly available illustrations as tools to describe eukaryotic microbial diversity
Vincent – Dana-Farber retractions: meet the blogger who spotted problems in dozens of cancer papers

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Nels and Vincent discuss how the rewetting of seasonally dried soils, a critical event in Mediterranean grasslands that reactivates dormant soil microorganisms, leading to pulses of carbon and nitrogen mineralization, and is accompanied by a bloom of viral diversity, followed by extensive viral community turnover.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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• Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Viral but not bacterial community successional patterns reflect extreme turnover shortly after rewetting dry soils

Science Picks

Nels - Bluesky
Vincent - Cancer Virus Hunters: A History of Tumor Virology

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Nels and Vincent take apart an amazing symbiosis consisting of two bacteria, one bacteriophage, and seven different genomes all within a single-celled alga.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
•A single crowded cryptomonad cell (Curr Biol)
•Letters read on TWiEVO 94

Science Picks

Nels – What happened at NIH during the last government shutdown
Vincent – Geneticist J. Craig Venter: ‘I consider retirement tantamount to death’

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Nels and Vincent review a collision of synthetic biology and experimental evolution, using a minimal synthetic bacterial cell with only 473 genes, the smallest genome of any known organism that can be grown in lab culture.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Evolution of a minimal cell (Nature)

Science Picks

Nels – Life magnified stamp collection

Vincent – Matters Microbial

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Nels and Vincent explain a study of how interspecies competition between two algae influences evolution of metabolism and size.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
• Metabolic evolution during competition (Curr Biol)

Science Picks

Nels – How amino acids got their names (Source)

Vincent – EVs Fix One Pollution Problem—And Worsen Another

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Nels and Vincent discuss new findings using phylogenetic approaches about how complex eukaryotic cells emerged from prokaryotic ancestors, which firmly place eukaryotes as a clade nested within the Asgard archaea.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent RacanielloS

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•Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
•Heimdallarchaeial ancestry of eukaryotes (Nature)

Science Picks

Nels – Juneteenth issue of Cell – collection of essays from black and brown scientists

Vincent – Tara Oceans

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Nels and Vincent provide insights into the mystery of mouse mummies on the summits of >6000 m Andean volcanoes, including whether they were living there and if so why?

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
•Mystery of mouse mummies (bioRxiv)

Science Picks

Nels – Zoonomia
Vincent – SeaPhages

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Nels and Vincent discuss the observation that cells on a boundary of a solid tumor have higher growth rates compared to those in the center and how to model this difference using genome sequencing data.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
•Evolutionary models of solid tumor growth (Nat Ecol Evol)

Science Picks

Nels – TWiV 1000
Vincent – The dream of wiping out polio might need a rethink

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Nels and Vincent review a study of the dogs of Chernobyl which reveals that genetically distinct populations with different amounts of western breed contributions to their genomes, the first step in assessing the effects of exposure to long-term ionizing radiation.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
•The dogs of Chernobyl (Science Adv)
•What the dogs of Chernobyl can teach us (Stat)
•Letters read on TWiEVO 88

Science Picks

Nels – Hellbent documentary and Insufficient evidence for natural selection associated with the Black Death
Vincent – BioRender

Listener Pick

Walter – Oded Rechavi and interview

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Nathan joins Nels and Vincent to discuss his approach to understanding how species adopt novel traits to overcome challenges, and its application to identifying coding and noncoding sequence changes that underlie mammalian hairlessness.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Nathan Clark

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Links for this episode

•Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
•Gene loss in marine mammals (TWiEVO 34)
•Gene change underlying mammalian hair loss (eLife)
•Letters read on TWiEVO 87

Science Picks

Nels – Local news coverage of Amanda, Maria, and Nathan’s paper
Vincent – Discovering Retroviruses by Anna Marie Skalka
Nathan – Genomics of Secondarily Temperate Adaptation in the Only Non-Antarctic Icefish

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Nels and Vincent discuss how evolution of changes in stop codon assignment might occur, and a novel mechanism for altering the meaning of translation stop codons discovered in a trypanosomatid with the apropos name, Blastocrithidia nonstop.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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•Join the MicrobeTV Discord server
•Novel stop codon reassignment mechanisms (Nature)

Science Picks

Nels – Protein Synthesis: An epic on the cellular level 

Vincent – Widespread stop-codon recoding in bacteriophages may regulate translation of lytic genes discussed on TWiM 277

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Nels and Vincent discuss the use of genome sequence data for over 4,000 domestic, semi-feral, and wild canids to understand the genetic drivers of canine behavior.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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Links for this episode

• Genetic drivers of canine diversification (Cell)
• Time stamps by Jolene. Thanks!

Science Picks

Nels – Ghosts of Science Past Still Haunt Us by C. Brandon Ogbunu
Vincent – The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll

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Nels and Vincent review the use of ancient DNA to identify loci that may have been under selection during the Black Death by studying populations before, during, and after the pandemic.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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Links for this episode

• Evolution of immune genes associated with Black Death (Nature)
• ERAP2 and respiratory disease (medRxiv)
• Time stamps by Jolene. Thanks!

Science Picks

Nels – Interview with Paul Turner in Current Biology and Map of the World if you are a fish
Vincent – Smallpox and its eradication

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Florian Maderspacher from Current Biology joins Nels and Vincent to discuss a special issue of the journal on birds.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Florian Maderspacher

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Links for this episode

• Current Biology Birds Special Issue
• Scott Edwards bikes across the US (Audubon)
• Support Diversity Issues in Evolution (Go Fund Me)
• Time stamps by Jolene. Thanks!

Science Picks

Florian – Favorite birds of authors/contributors in Birds issue
Nels –Loss of avian intromittent organs as a sperm competition strategy: a race to be last
Vincent – Malaria at the Bronx Zoo (TWiP 110)

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Nels and Vincent consider evidence that a single amino acid change in the TKTL1 gene might have led to greater neurogenesis in the frontal cortex of modern humans compared with Neanderthals.

Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

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Links for this episode

• Human TKTL1 implies greater neurogenesis (Science)
• Everyone’s a little bit Neanderthal (TWiEVO 8)
• Tragic gene flow from Neanderthals (TWiV 676)
• Time stamps by Jolene. Thanks!

Science Picks

Nels – Unusual display of elements
Vincent – Sykdomspulsen and summary

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