Koalas, Chlamydia, Microbiomania, Katie Dahlhausen, John Oliver, Russell Crowe, and me.

I love Chlamydia.  Really I do.  It was in a paper analyzing two Chlamydial genomes that I first noticed a very strange pattern of genome evolution.



This in turn led to our discovery that large genome inversions in bacteria and archaea are most common when they are symmetric around the origin of replication.



This may be my favorite paper from my entire career and I owe it all to Chlamydia.

Plus, there are all sorts of jokes one can make with the Giant Microbe Chlamydias like

Ironic I know but putting Chlamydia near my special place makes it awkward to go #ucdmicroboome pic.twitter.com/DR8eEJdDOA

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) October 27, 2017

and

It reminds me of when we all kept giving each other chlamydia with @phylogenomics 's 'Gut Check' game at #scifoo :D who doesn't love a free set of crabs lol! https://t.co/ltuxAbKFFC

— Carin Anne Bondar (@carinbondar) February 14, 2018

Koalas, Chlamydia, Antibiotics and Microbiomes - what else do you need?

Katie Dahlhausen, a PhD student in my lab, has become really really interested (perhaps a bit obsessed) with a really interesting case study regarding koalas, Chlamydia, antibiotics, and microbiomes.  Since we do not have funds to work on this in the lab, she has started an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds to work on this.  For more information on this project and how Koalas, Chlamydia, antibiotics and microbiomes are connected see "The Koala Project" page.