Biology subjects

Smolander, N.

Publications and source records attributed to Smolander, N..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Eco-evolutionary dynamics and environmental detoxification jointly shape bacterial community response to antibiotic perturbation

Microbial communities frequently encounter recurrent antibiotic disturbance, yet how ecological, evolutionary, and environmental processes jointly shape the response remains unresolved. Here we experimentally disentangle these mechanisms using a 23-species bacterial community exposed to ampicillin pulses with pre-pulse and resistance priming. Pre-pulse priming preconditioned community composition toward resistant taxa, reducing compositional change during the main pulse. Resistance priming was the dominant determinant of community response, buffering compositional change, relaxing selection, and altering gene expression. This buffering arose from both evolution of higher resistance and accelerated ampicillin detoxification by a dominant degrader, which transiently reduced antibiotic effects and favoured non-degrading taxa. Yet buffering did not translate into better recovery: because resistance was coupled to competitive dominance, diversity remained comparable to or below that of ancestral communities, and dominance was reinforced. Together, we show that antibiotic history reshapes microbial disturbance response through coupled eco-evolutionary and environmental feedbacks, generating a trade-off between resistance and recovery.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2025

Polyacrylamide bead split-pool method for microbial community analysis

Understanding diverse microbial communities is important due to their ecological and medical significance. Bacterial cells are genetically and phenotypically heterogeneous, making their interactions in the communities complex. The heterogeneity and interactions of cells contribute to the formation of specific spatial structures, such as biofilms, and the spread of antibiotic resistance. Here, we describe a novel single-cell approach for studying the cellular heterogeneity and spatial interactions in microbial communities that combines polyacrylamide bead encapsulation of cells and split-pool-barcoding. We demonstrate the method by determining artificially imposed interactions and connecting the taxonomic information in a mock three-species bacterial community with a species-specific genomic target. The method can be utilised for the spatial analysis of microbial communities as well as, once fully optimised for single-cell resolution, linking genetic traits to single cells.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2021

Prider - multiplexed primer design using linearly scaling approximation of set coverage

Designing oligonucleotide primers and probes is one of the key steps of various laboratory experiments such as multiplexed PCR or digital multiplexed ligation assays. When designing primers and probes to complex, heterogeneous DNA data sets, an optimization problem arises where the smallest number of oligonucleotides covering the largest diversity of the input dataset needs to be identified. Tools that provide this optimization in an efficient manner for large input data are currently lacking. Here we present Prider, an R package for designing primers and probes with a nearly optimal coverage for complex and large sequence sets. Prider initially prepares a full primer coverage of the input sequences, the complexity of which is subsequently reduced by removing components of high redundancy or narrow coverage. The primers from the resulting near-optimal coverage are easily accessible as data frames and their coverage across the input sequences can be visualized as heatmaps using Priders plotting function. Prider scales linearly to increasing sequence data and therefore permits efficient design of primers to large and highly diverse DNA datasets. Prider is available on GitHub under the permissive BSD-3-clause license: https://github.com/manutamminen/prider

bioinformatics↗