Mike Blazanin
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mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Mike Blazanin
@mikeblazanin.bsky.social
3.5K followers 3.1K following 200 posts
Postdoc with @kayla-king.bsky.social and @sarperotto.bsky.social at UBC. Host-pathogen evolution. C. elegans, phages, and bacterial communities. Modeling and experimental evolution. Microbial and computational methods.

https://mikeblazanin.com/
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mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Obviously, this could be system-specific, so we used modeling to generalize our findings. Our modeling showed a surprising effect: while dispersal is selected for in the absence of phages, the presence of phages completely eliminates that selection.

7/n
Fig 5 from linked paper. X axis is labeled "Bacterial Invader's Relative Resistance" and y axis is labeled "Bacterial Invader's Relative Dispersal". There are three plots labeled "Control", "Local", and "Global". In each, there is a 5x5 grid of boxed colored by the Bacterial Invader's Relative Fitness. This grid is a fitness landscape, and shows that in the Control treatment dispersal is beneficial while resistance is neutral, while in the Local and Global treatments dispersal becomes neutral and resistance becomes beneficial
December 17, 2024 at 12:52 AM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
In our experiments, we saw bacteria evolve resistance to phages depending on their level of phage exposure. However, we never saw that bacteria evolved dispersal to avoid phages.

6/n
Fig 4 from linked paper. Y axis is growth in soft agar, x axis shows four treatments: Ancestor, Control, Local, and Global. There are two rows of plots, the top row is labeled "Environment less favorable to parasites", and the bottom row is labeled "Environment more favorable to parasites". The data points show that the Ancestor bacteria generally had the lowest level of soft agar growth, but that there was not much difference between the Control, Local, and Global treatments.
December 17, 2024 at 12:52 AM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Bluesky right now:
Meme of astronaut looking at Earth from space saying "Wait, it's all starter packs?" Another astronaut behind the first pointing a gun at him, saying "Always has been"
November 12, 2024 at 11:56 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
I was #680,774!
September 17, 2024 at 4:05 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
You've heard of March Madness, now it's time for
Bracket labeled "starch madness", including contenders: hash browns, boiled potatoes, potato skins, steak fries, shoestring fries, tater tots, potatoes au gratin, mashed potato, curly fries, roasted potato, potato wedges, croquettes, baked potato, waffle fries, sweet potato, and chips
April 1, 2024 at 6:57 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Excited to share I'll soon be moving to start a postdoc at UBC with Kayla King and Sally Otto. Enjoying my last few months here in New Haven and looking forward to new experiences in Vancouver. Stay tuned for my work using C. elegans and theory to study host-microbe ecology and evolution
Image of the UBC campus, featuring a clock tower and ornate cathedral-like building in front of a setting sun
February 8, 2024 at 7:17 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
February 1, 2024 at 6:52 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Anyone know what happened around Jan 24th? 🖥️🧬
Plot showing daily downloads from CRAN over the past year for packages biogrowth, growthrates, growthcurver, plater, QurvE, and gcplyr. There is a massive spike at the very end of the plot (coinciding with Jan 24th and 25th, 2024)
January 30, 2024 at 5:54 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
gcplyr 1.8.0 was released today! This version includes expanded import file formats, a new smoothing method, and increased flexibility of several functions, along with several bug fixes and documentation improvements.

mikeblazanin.github.io/gcplyr/
An image of the landing page at https://github.com/mikeblazanin/gcplyr Text reads: What this package can do - gcplyr was created to make it easier to import, wrangle, and do model-free analyses of microbial growth curve data, as commonly output by plate readers. - gcplyr can flexibly import all the common data formats output by plate readers and reshape them into ‘tidy’ formats for analyses. - gcplyr can import experimental designs from files or directly in R, then merge this design information with density data. - This merged tidy-shaped data is then easy to work with and plot using functions from gcplyr and popular packages dplyr and ggplot2. - gcplyr can calculate plain and per-capita derivatives of density data. - gcplyr has several methods to deal with noise in density or derivatives data. - gcplyr can extract parameters like growth rate/doubling time, carrying capacity, diauxic shifts, extinction, and more without fitting an equation for growth to your data. ...
January 30, 2024 at 5:35 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Wow, remarkable statistics from the first in-person @meehubs.bsky.social! A massive gathering of outstanding microbial ecology and evolution science
Poster slide saying: Some statistics: 325 abstract submissions 64 talks 166 virtual posters (and some in-person-only posters) 899 registrations across 6 hubs and virtual only 9242 Slack messages and counting, about 3000 messages in the last month About 44 hours of live conferencing across 3 'days'
January 11, 2024 at 6:27 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Me, with too many good @meehubs.bsky.social talks
Image of a woman and the text "It's overwhelmed"
January 11, 2024 at 2:57 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Me, after 8 hours of @meehubs.bsky.social today
Image from Monty Python sketch of a man with a white bandana and silly Charlie Chaplain-style mustache and the words "my brain hurts"
January 10, 2024 at 3:55 AM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Boston-bound! Looking forward to the 2024 microbial ecology and evolution MEEHubs meeting @meehubs.bsky.social with @noahhoupt.bsky.social and @norapyenson.bsky.social
Image from inside an Amtrak train looking down the (empty) aisle
January 9, 2024 at 12:14 AM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
gcplyr v1.7 is out now!

gcplyr is an R package that makes it easy to wrangle and do model-free analysis of #microbial growth curve data

This ver includes: more merges, better docs including how to do multiple plates of data, and other improvements

🦠 🧫 #MicroSky 🧪

github.com/mikeblazanin...
A screenshot of the landing page at https://mikeblazanin.github.io/gcplyr/
November 6, 2023 at 7:13 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
better watch out @wcratcliff.bsky.social, Turner lab is gunning to replace your study system with our own
Picture of a Brita water filter pitcher with clearly-green sediment in it and a post-it on it saying "Evolution of Algal Multicellularity Experiment In Progress"
November 1, 2023 at 5:34 PM
mikeblazanin.bsky.social
Since SciSky is growing, thought I'd share a little project of mine that recently went live: mikeblazanin.com/ZoteroRecomm...

It sends personalized recommendations of papers you might be interested in, based on the contents of your Zotero library

Try it out, let me know what you think!
Example of a ZoteroRecommender email that was sent to me on August 23, 2023. The email contains some stats about my Zotero library, 8 papers recommended to me that I don't have in my Zotero library, and 3 papers that I do have in my library that are popular with others
August 24, 2023 at 5:30 PM