Update: Here is a really nice graphic that Kruttika and Gaurav made, that captures some of the fun results from this work.
Our work showing rapid, parallel adaptation in Methylobacterium extorquens is now out online on the MBE website. The work represents a huge team effort from members of my former postdoctoral lab and my current lab at NCBS- Mrudula, Kruttika, Gaurav and Alefiyah. We are very excited about this paper, partly because of the surprisingly large adaptive benefits of synonymous mutations, and also because we show that no single mechanism underlies these fitness effects. Our understanding of the evolution of codon bias just got murkier, but also that much more interesting- we need new hypotheses!
You can access the paper here, and read a news article about it on the NCBS webpage.
AdaptationLab 