mSphere of Influence: How I Learned to Love Bacteria and their Tangled Evolutionary Tree

Tera Levin works in the fields of evolution, microbiology, and genetics, studying how adaptation shapes the molecular interactions between eukaryotic hosts and bacterial pathogens. In this mSphere of Influence article, she reflects on how the paper “Population genomics of early events in the ecological differentiation of bacteria” by Shapiro et al. (B. J. Shapiro, J. Friedman, O. X. Cordero, S. P. Preheim, et al., Science 336:48–51, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1218198) changed the way she thinks about bacterial gene and genome evolution.