Lilian Caesar

I am thrilled to share that this fall I’ll be joining the University of Oklahoma School of Biological Sciences (@ou.edu) as an Assistant Professor! The Caesar Lab will study the ecology and evolution of host-microbiome interactions in social bees (honey bees, stingless bees and more) 🦠🐝

A mitochondrion-like ribosome in an insect endosymbiont https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.18.759926v1

A new narrative for social immunity research in termites #microbiology #insects #termites #immunity www.cell.com/trends-open/...

Your favorite website for illustrations of almost all organisms is looking for donations to help cover its running costs! Please consider donating to help keep this open-source platform running: www.phylopic.org/images

Excited that our new paper with @henrylabsymbio.bsky.social and Kerry Oliver is out @pnas.org! We show that mobile genetic elements can spread adaptive host-benefiting traits across heritable insect symbionts on eco-evolutionary timescales.🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Bacterial secreted products selectively inhibit non-symbiotic fungi in bees https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.16.752052v1

apply.interfolio.com/188995 Assoc/Full Prof in microbiome research at OU! Join our growing microbiome community! From bees and plants to freshwater, bats and soils, you’ll find collabs spanning mechanisms to eco-evo. I’ve just arrived,but can say: outstanding research env and wonderful colleagues!

Colony morphogenesis regulates sporulation dynamics in bacterial biofilms -in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Our review is now online! Led by @soobinshin.bsky.social, we dig into the secondary metabolites shaping insect-fungus symbioses, from mutualists to parasites, and how they drive host specificity, behaviour & immunity 🐛🪲🍄🍄‍🟫 @thesainsburylab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

The RAxML-NG v2.0 preprint is out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... v2.0 features integrated model testing, fast branch support metrics, automatic parallelization, phylogenetic difficulty prediction, genotype evolution models, to name but the most important features. And it is A LOT FASTER of course

apply.interfolio.com/188995 Assoc/Full Prof in microbiome research at OU! Join our growing microbiome community! From bees and plants to freshwater, bats and soils, you’ll find collabs spanning mechanisms to eco-evo. I’ve just arrived,but can say: outstanding research env and wonderful colleagues!

Some resources and advice for those considering applying to the NSF GRFP this year (3 year grad school stipend: first year grad students, post-bachelor, and seniors might consider applying): brianomeara.info/posts/grfp_2... 🧪 #AcademicSky

Very happy that our paper Obligate cross-feeding of metabolites is common in soil microbial communities just came out in Nature Microbiology. See here 👇 Paywalled version: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Free read-only version: rdcu.be/fBHAb

New preprint from the lab: The Latent Simplicity of Microbial Ecological Interactions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We're excited about this one. We find that high-order microbial interactions often obey simple linear laws making microbial communities far more predictable than one might expect

Come join the @socialfluids.bsky.social lab in Cambridge to study the evolution of Socially Transferred Materials! Fun new HFSP project btwn UK, NL and Costa Rica! Deadline September 7th #Postdoc #JobAlert #Evolution #Bioinformatics #STM #socialfluids www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc... leboeuflab.com

Ever wondered how new evolutionary individuals arise? Wanted to engineer communities so the parts integrate to form a new whole? Or impose conditions that cause simple chemistries to become Darwinian? New MS shows how. Psst… don’t tell AI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Using the largest available species-level insect phylogenies and all available trait data, @sachi1n.bsky.social sky.social and I estimated the number of independent transitions to eusociality and the transition rate in haplodiploid vs. diploid lineages. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 9/10

Heard of the haplodiploid hypothesis (=¾ relatedness hypothesis)? It’s long been a staple of biology textbooks – you may’ve run into it in Intro Biology, Genetics, Evolution, or Behavior. It’s also been very influential on social evolution theory, yet surprisingly, it long remained untested.🧵

🚀 Thrilled to share our first metaSPLiT preprint from @annabiosys.bsky.social's lab in collaboration with @gibbological.bsky.social! Explore hidden bacterial phenotypic heterogeneity in the human gut microbiome and discover the concept of "physiological guilds": www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Dear microbiome enthusiasts: I'm excited to be moving my lab to New York University this fall (& the NYU Institute for Engineering Health); with joint-appointment @isbscience.org I'm hiring a postdoc @ NYU to look at diet-driven evolution in the gut: apply.interfolio.com/189980 Please share! 🦠🤓

Excited to announce a new preprint out now. Myself and Laurie Balstad led a group of predominantly early career theoreticians (along with Marissa Baskett and Mikaela Provost) to compile a set of guiding principles for data-model integration in theoretical ecology.

Happy to announce that a new opinion paper of our group just came out: A conceptual framework to dissect emergent functions in microbial communities with @swagatika.bsky.social @sharvari27.bsky.social @anjanaprasad.bsky.social @palshubharthi.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Applications are open for the 2027 Smith Conservation Research Fellowship! This postdoc supports early-career scientists advancing innovative, applied conservation research across the U.S. & territories. conbio.org/publications/scb-news-blog/smith-fellows-2027-call-for-proposals-announced

Here's a chance to support an inspiring Indigenous-led agroforestry project in the Amazon : ) maearth.com/meli-bees/ag...

Proposed terminology for referring to the homes of #symbionts within their ( #insect ) hosts " #Symbiotic organs in #insects: diversity, functional implications, and terminology " w/ @kaltenpoth-lab.bsky.social and co., not in bsky doi.org/10.1098/rstb... #SymbioSky

really lovely piece of work from @raufs.bsky.social et al., Complex multicellularity is linked with expanded specialized metabolite production in microorganisms www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint from our lab Statistical learning of bacterial growth in combinatorially constructed environments, led by brilliant PhD student Andrea Arrabal. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We systematically study nutrient-nutrient interactions in bacterial growth under carbon-limiting conditions.

We are very excited to share our latest. We thought that soft sweeps would be the only type of sweep spreading across human gut microbiomes. Turns out many are hard! Reach @peterlaurin.bsky.social 's thread on why! And tomorrow at #SMBE2026 I will share this work and more!

Interested in wildlife microbiomes? Check out the latest @microbiomevif.bsky.social podcast episode, where @elinvidevall.bsky.social explains how the #microbiome influences health and survival in wild animal populations, and why microbes matter for #wildlife conservation efforts! 🧪🦒🦌

Bonus content for the #WorldMicrobiomeDay 🌐🦠 We asked microbiome researchers about the impact of Artificial intelligence on their research. Here's what they had to say: rdcu.be/fqEkp #MicrobiomeSky #MicroSky

1/2 🚨 New commentary in @pnas.org "Maynard Smith’s protein-space analogy, realized" Here, we invoke Maynard Smith's protein space to discuss a study proposing that evolution has explored a tiny fraction of functional protein sequences, chiefly b/c of common ancestry: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New Perspective out co-led with Lisa Pagani! We look at how microbiome ecology and evolution shape AMR across scales, from within-host communities to hospitals and environments, and how mathematical models can help us understand them. @natmicrobiol.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint from the lab, led by PhD student Leopold Preuß, with @marta-tischer.bsky.social, @cblei.bsky.social, and others. We show genomic evidence for #Wolbachia being an overlooked nutritional symbiont in solitary #bees. #SymbioSky https://tinyurl.com/3wzt27hy Short thread: (1/8)

Our paper on the evolution of cellular miniaturization is now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... A short recap 🧵

I'm hiring a #postdoc!! 🥳 Official ad is making its way through HR but If you have interests in statistical methodology OR microbial bioinformatics, please reach out via my UW email. I'll share the description with you when it's available. 🔥😻

🚨 Registration for VEGA26 is 👏 officially open 👏 🚨 The 5th edition of our Viral EcoGenomics and Applications symposium will be held November 18-19, 2026, on the UC Berkeley campus 🧬 🦠 🔬 🧫 Event website ➡️ jgi.doe.gov/work-with-us... Registration link ➡️ cvent.me/e0RnA0

I will be in Cleveland for #Evol2026 in 2 weeks so feel free to chat with me if you will be in attendance! 🐠

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Very cool results! I do wonder how the "queen cell as gatekeeper" model fits with the fact that queens can be reared successfully in artificial systems in the lab. Could the queen cell be contributory rather than essential?

A question to bacteriology/phage friends 🦠 Can anyone point me to a paper showing plaques forming in E. coli that are spotted after co-incubation with a conjugative donor (e.g., after mating using a conjugation helper)? Any help will be most appreciated 🙂 #phage

Big news: I’ll be joining the University of Oklahoma as an Assistant Professor in January 2027! 🎉 My lab will study plant microbiomes, fungal ecology & restoration. Recruiting graduate students for Fall 2027! Interested in joining the lab or collaborating? Let’s connect! BOOMER SOONER 🏈🍄🌱✨

Tropical Bee Assemblage Diversity Decreases With Elevation While Body Size Increases - Turley - 2026 - Biotropica - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Our paper "Gene ancestries reveal diverse microbial associations during eukaryogenesis.” is finally out in Nature. Eukaryogenesis was likely a gradual process shaped by multiple microbial partners and virus-mediated gene transfer, rather than a single binary symbiosis. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

"A dead mouse in a honey bee nest is like a dead whale shark in the lobby of an apartment building" So glad the reviewers, and Insect Socio, didn't cut that line! Awesome work, and surprising results, led by Erica Maul @ericamaul.bsky.social

How do social networks become adaptive? From self-organisation and phase transitions to cultural learning, social networks are shaped by feedback between individual interactions and collective dynamics. Check my new @cp-trendsecolevo.bsky.social paper www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The list of Ecology/Evolution/Marine Bio Labs recruiting grad students for Fall 2027 is live! PIs enter your position info here: forms.gle/MAGd4ohyPeoY... students (and PIs not recruiting) share the composite list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... Please share widely! 🧪

Excited to be presenting at #ASMicrobe for the first time! I’m making some mini linocut prints for the occasion—stop by my poster if you’d like to grab one and learn about my work investigating how interactions with Drosophila shape Pseudomonas populations: MECH-SUN-554, June 7, 12:30-1:30pm

I’m at ASM Microbe, and seeking postdoc positions after May 2027! Stop by my Rapid Fire talk (3 pm AEM session “Microbial Life on Land”) or my poster (AEM Friday poster #601) to hear some of what I’ve been working on in my PhD! @binningsingletons.com #phagesky

Almost time to kick-off this year's ASM Microbe, including some very cool sessions in the next few days in the AEM meeting ! If you're around and want to chat anything metagenomes, phages, viruses, and all that, let me know !