H. Merrikh

The paper develops PIC-seq to study RNA polymerase dynamics in Salmonella during infection, finding increased RNAP backtracking and its role in virulence.

This paper identifies a small molecule, ARM-1, that inhibits bacterial evolution by targeting Mfd, delaying AMR development across multiple pathogens.

This paper introduces lag-time analysis to measure replication fork velocity and pausing in vivo, finding locus- and time-dependent dynamics and novel pauses at rDNA.

The paper establishes an exact correspondence between deterministic and stochastic cell cycle models, showing deterministic models can well-fit exponential culture demographics even with stochastic state timing.

The paper investigates whether lagging strand genes evolve faster due to replication-transcription conflicts and finds convergent mutations are enriched in these genes, suggesting adaptive evolution.

The paper responds to criticism of their adaptive hypothesis of lagging-strand gene orientation by providing empirical evidence supporting their original findings and introducing an improved GC skew method.

This study shows that gene inversion in bacteria increases evolvability by promoting head-on replication-transcription collisions, leading to higher mutation rates and positive selection in head-on genes.

This paper uses time-lapse imaging to show that replication forks remain spatially close in two bacterial species, supporting the Factory Model over the Track Model.