Evolutionary Studies at Vanderbilt

05/29/2026

📖 Our Spring 2026 magazine is out!

This issue has everything: a Nashville ice storm and what it means for climate science, graduate students proving math with bacteria, AI designing antibodies against bird flu, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for one of our own.

Plus book reviews, faculty awards, a new museum studies course, and a tribute to a retiring colleague who quietly built the data infrastructure that powers biodiversity research around the world.

Free to read at the link in our first comment. 👇

05/28/2026

In 1940, a German immigrant physicist arrived at Vanderbilt with ideas that would eventually earn him a Nobel Prize. Max Delbruck spent seven years here studying bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria — at a time when almost no one understood why that mattered.

When he was ready to expand his lab, he asked Vanderbilt for more funding. The amount he requested exceeded the entire College of Arts and Sciences budget. Vanderbilt could not accommodate him, and he left.

He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and genetic structure of viruses made while at Vanderbilt.

05/27/2026

🦠 Your gut is home to trillions of bacteria. Most are harmless. Some are not.

New research from Vanderbilt's Zhu Lab, published in Cell, reveals how a toxin-producing strain of Bacteroides fragilis does something remarkable — it rewires the gut environment to become more oxygenated, then exploits that oxygen using a complete metabolic pathway more commonly associated with oxygen-using organisms.

In other words, this pathogen does not just tolerate inflammation. It engineers it.

The findings help explain why this bacterium is so strongly linked to colorectal cancer — and point toward new strategies for disrupting that cycle. The work also involved collaboration with Vanderbilt's Behringer Lab, which used comparative genomics to show this metabolic trick is not a one-off quirk but part of a broader evolutionary pattern.

Read the press release: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/evolution/vanderbilt_team_discovers_how_a_gut_pathogen_thrives_in_inflammation/

05/26/2026

🐟 Antarctic icefish live in waters near the freezing point of saltwater, where sea ice filters out most visible light, shifting what remains toward redder wavelengths. It is one of the most extreme visual environments on Earth.
Research from Vanderbilt's Castiglione Lab, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, found that icefish evolved specific mutations in rhodopsin — the protein that drives dim-light vision in rod photoreceptors — that simultaneously altered both how the protein absorbs light and how quickly it resets after activation. That dual change surprised even the researchers.
The result is a visual system fine-tuned not just to darkness, but to the specific quality of light filtering through Antarctic sea ice.
There is a climate change wrinkle, too. As sea ice melts, the light environment under the water will change — and icefish, so precisely adapted to current conditions, may find their vision increasingly mismatched to their own habitat.
Read the full story at the link in our first comment. 👇

05/25/2026

🦈 The shark body plan is older than the tree body plan.

The oldest known tree, Wattieza, evolved around 385 million years ago during the Devonian period — well before the famous coal forests that came later. But sharks got there first. The earliest fossil evidence for shark-like scales dates to around 450 million years ago, meaning a shark-like body plan was already swimming the oceans for at least 65 million years before the first tree ever grew toward a sky that had never seen shade.

Individual sharks do not live longer than trees, of course. But as an evolutionary form, the shark got there first.

And it worked so well that natural selection has barely changed it since. 🌳

05/22/2026

Mark your calendars, Nashville! 🎉

The Evolutionary Studies Initiative at Vanderbilt is hosting a Biodiversity Day event at the Adventure Science Center on Thursday, November 5, 4:00-6:00 PM in the Fossil Frontiers Gallery!

Join us for an evening of science, faculty research booths, and a talk by Dr. Jaap de Roode of Emory University on his acclaimed book Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves. 🐝🦋🐻

Registration link coming soon. Stay tuned!

Adventure Science Center

05/21/2026

Nils Baricelli
He simulated evolution on a computer. In 1962.
Before anyone was talking about artificial life, before anyone had a personal computer, Nils Baricelli was at Vanderbilt running simulations of evolution on one of the earliest computers in existence.

He called them "numerical evolution experiments." He watched digital organisms mutate, compete, and adapt on punch cards and printouts. His colleagues thought it was strange. History has been kinder.

Baricelli never quite got the recognition he deserved at Vanderbilt — or anywhere, really. He was decades ahead of his time, asking questions that the rest of science wouldn't catch up to until the 1980s and 90s.

Some ideas are just too early for their moment.

05/19/2026

The Turkana people of northern Kenya walk hours each day to fetch water in one of the world's most arid landscapes. Researchers found that about 90% of those they studied were dehydrated — but generally healthy.

How? Evolution.

Working in partnership with Turkana communities, Vanderbilt's Dr. Amanda Lea and collaborators sequenced 367 genomes and found strong evidence of natural selection on a kidney gene called STC1 — which helps the body conserve water AND process a high-protein diet. The timing of these adaptations lines up with the aridification of northern Africa around 5,000 years ago.

There's a catch though. As more Turkana move to cities, those same adaptations may increase risk for chronic diseases — a classic case of evolutionary mismatch.

Published in Science.



📷 Photo credit: Sebastian Michel Mata

05/18/2026

Lin's work understanding what drive plant phenology is amazing!

Assistant Professor Lin Meng has been named an Early Career Fellow by the Ecological Society of America, recognizing her research on how vegetation responds to climate and human activity and what those shifts mean for communities.

Her work in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences focuses on phenology, which includes the production of leaves, flowering, and leaf fall. By linking large-scale environmental data with local, lived impacts, her work highlights how even subtle ecological shifts can influence urban environments, public health, and long-term sustainability strategies.

“Some of the changes I study are subtle, but those small shifts add up to real consequences for how people experience cities, from allergy exposure to heat. That connection is what drives my work,” Meng said. “This fellowship gives me room to ask bigger questions and build collaborations that cut across ecology, public health, and urban planning. I want to make these changes more visible in ways that people can actually use.”

Congratulations, Lin Meng!

05/18/2026

You are not alone. You never have been.

The human gut contains roughly 38 trillion microbial cells — about the same number as your own cells. These bacteria, fungi, and archaea have been co-evolving with humans for millions of years, and they are not just passengers.

Your microbiome helps digest food your own cells cannot process, trains your immune system to distinguish friend from foe, and even produces neurotransmitters that influence your mood. Some researchers think of it less as a collection of guests and more as an organ that evolution forgot to give you a gene sequence for.

Here is the wild part: when you are born, you inherit your first microbiome from your mother. Evolution built the handoff directly into the process.