Aswin Krishna

Opinion | I’m the Prime Minister of Spain. This Is Why the West Needs Migrants. - The New York Times In Spain, it is our duty to become the welcoming and tolerant society our ancestors would have hoped to find on the other side of our borders.

Pedro Sánchez, prime minister of Spain, shows what pragmatic and ideological leadership looks like www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/o...

Quantifying the effects of antibiotic resistance and within-host competition on strain fitness in Streptococcus pneumoniae Competition significantly influences bacterial population dynamics, particularly in how strains interact within and between hosts. This study shows that within-host competition in Streptococcus pneumo...

New(ish!) paper on how within-host competition and antibiotic resistance shape the fitness of Streptococcus pneumoniae serotypes, out in August in Plos Biology. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Top: Schematics explaining how the categorical variables effective-drug-use, ineffective-drug-use and resistance-without-drug are defined based on the set of drugs consumed by the host and resistances carried on strains. Since these three variables are defined analogous to levels of a categorical variable, their effect sizes are to be interpreted relative to the fitness effect corresponding to ‘baseline for comparison’. Bottom: An example showing how the values of the three covariates vary with time. The first two episodes of carriage are resistant to penicillin. The orange lines indicate the value of the covariates for the first 10A serotype as used in clearance models. The green lines indicate the value for the second 10A serotype as used in establishment models.

Competition & #bacterial #PopulationDynamics. @krishnaaswin77.bsky.social @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social &co show that within-host competition in #Streptococcus increases clearance & reduces establishment; #AntibioticResistance increases susceptibility to competition @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4lqcZba

Do plasmids evolve faster 🐇, slower 🐢, or just like chromosomes 🧬?

In our new paper, we tackled this question using theory, simulations, bioinformatics, and experiments!

👇 Check out all the details in Paula’s thread!

Hint: 🐇 (most of the time)

Postdoctoral Researcher – Experimental Microbial Population Biology

Two postdoc positions have been advertised in our lab at @ethzurich.bsky.social with Sebastian Bonhoeffer & Roland Regoes. If you are interested in experimental (jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP...) or theoretical (jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP...) epidemiology, then apply before the 2nd of June!

The evolution of antibiotic resistance in Europe, 1998–2019 Author summary Antibiotic resistance is an important public health threat: resistant infections are currently associated with 5 million deaths per year globally. This burden may increase further in th...

New paper: long-term trends in antibiotic resistance show signs of stabilisation (thread). journals.plos.org/plospathogen...

New vaccine concept tackles harmful bacteria in the intestine In the fight against bacterial pathogens, researchers are combining vaccination with targeted colonization of the intestine by harmless microorganisms. This approach could potentially mark a turning p...

In the fight against bacterial pathogens, researchers are combining vaccination with targeted colonization of the intestine by harmless microorganisms. This approach could potentially mark a turning point in the antibiotics crisis. www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/news/detail/...

New preprint! 📢 Using a large longitudinal dataset of bacterial carriage we ask:
(A) Does within-host competition between bacterial strains lower their epidemiological fitness?
(B) Does this strain competition affect the fitness of Abx-resistant bugs?
Answer to both = yes. More details here👇

🚨 New preprint!! How can antibiotic-resistant bacteria increase in abundance in the human gut microbiome, even without antibiotics? 🧐 We show that strain-specific ecological interactions are key to understanding resistance dynamics in microbial communities. 🧵👇 1/5
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Interesting perspective to say that probability may not exist. What I make of this is - any probability value is based on an underlying model, and all models have assumptions behind them. In that sense, probabilities are subjective estimates.

Really happy to see this paper out. Extra special for me because it marks my first research publication. Aswin has officially entered the academic world! 📈🦠🧑‍💻

The impact of treatment strategies on the epidemiological dynamics of plasmid-conferred antibiotic resistance | PNAS The issue of antibiotic resistance is a critical concern for public health, prompting numerous investigations into the impact of treatment strategi...

New paper from our group in @pnas.org!! 🚀
Malte Mütter used our amazing liquid-handling robot to test different treatment strategies and found that combination therapy is the most effective to prevent the emergence of plasmid-mediated double resistance www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Cool paper on the effect of biotic interactions on the success of resistant strains within host!

Could you add me too please, thanks:)

Recent approaches in computational modelling for controlling pathogen threats In this review, we assess the status of computational modelling of pathogens. We focus on three disparate but interlinked research areas that produce models with very different spatial and temporal sc...

Fun to write this review with some research friends on modelling for infection disease control. Three case studies (antigen dynamics, AMR and vaccine design) and some reflections on COVID-19

www.life-science-alliance.org/content/7/9/...