Over the last 36 years, many researchers have contributed to the LTEE by performing the daily transfers of the 12 E. coli populations. Most of us are curious by nature, and many of us (the author of this post included) can be a bit competitive. With >12,000 transfers recorded in 13 lab notebooks, we have quite the historical record to analyze.
To recognize everyone’s efforts, we’ve created the LTEE Leaderboard! (Follow the link for the interactive version.)
If we zoom out, the most overwhelming signal is that Lenski lab manager Neerja Hajela is the all-time LTEE champion with 4349 transfers. That’s more than 1/3 of all LTEE transfers to date, a feat than is unlikely to ever be equaled! As we can see from the plot over time, Neerja did the transfers on most weekdays from 1996 to 2018.
There were other historical epochs marked by other Lenski lab managers: Lynette Ekunwe (1427 transfers), Sue Simpson (950 transfers), and Devin Lake (838 transfers). So far, only one member of the Barrick lab, Jack Dwenger (407 transfers), cracks the top ten at 7th. The plot also shows some gaps (when the experiment was paused for a move or pandemic) and a plateau (when we allowed populations that were behind to catch up).
We can also use the LTEE Leaderboard to slice and dice the data. For example, what does the leaderboard look like when we restrict it to transfers that were done on the weekend (Saturday or Sunday)?
Longtime LTEE researcher Zack Blount wins this category and we see some new graduate students and postdocs appear in this top 10 list.
You can even use the LTEE Leaderboard to figure out who did a transfer on a specific day in history. Darwin Day (February 12th) in 1993? Ryszard Korona.The Ides of March (March 15th) in 2009? Zack Blount.
Our plan is to continue to periodically update the LTEE Leaderboard, at least once a year when it is time to determine bragging rights for our annual Barrick lab Year in Review group meeting.
P.S. Your humbled-by-his-small-contribution author only clocks in at 26th on the all-time list with 78 transfers.
Data Acknowledgements and Availability
Thanks especially to Zack Blount and Devin Lake for digging through many years of LTEE notebooks and compiling the spreadsheet that made creating the LTEE Leaderboard possible. Code for the LTEE Shiny app and a CSV file of the underlying data are available on GitHub (https://github.com/barricklab/LTEE-leaderboard).