Projects

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  HGT and natural selection in microbial extended phenotypes

  Core Project

  Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) drives microbial evolution but is hard to detect. Researchers are developing new methods to study HGT in various bacterial populations and improve evolutionary analysis.

Publications

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  Vereau Gorbitz et al., 2025

  Vereau Gorbitz, D., Schwarz, C., McMullen, J. G., Cerón-Romero, M., Doyle, R. T., Lau, J. A., Whitaker, R. J., Vanderpool, C. K., & Heath, K. (2025). Plasmid transmission dynamics and evolution of partner quality in a natural population of Rhizobium leguminosarum. mBio 0:e02497-25.

  https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.02497-25
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  Heath et al., 2022

  Heath, K. D., Batstone, R. T., Cerón Romero, M., & McMullen, J. G. (2022). MGEs as the MVPs of partner quality variation in legume-Rhizobium symbiosis. mBio, 13(4).

  https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.00888-22