Research Area: Microbiota and Microbiomes
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Gillian Turgeon
The Turgeon lab works on mechanisms of fungal virulence to plants with particular emphasis on the roles of fungal secondary metabolites, iron and oxidative stress. Classical genetic, molecular genetic, and genomic approaches are used. -
Christine Smart
Two main areas of study in the Smart lab include identifying genes in bacterial pathogens that enable movement within a plant, and understanding the population diversity of rapidly reproducing oomycete pathogens. These studies enhance our knowledge of pathogen virulence determinants and further elucidate how plants[...] -
Brian Rudd
The Rudd lab is interested in how microbes alter immune development and how the adaptive immune system protects the host against acute and chronic pathogens. -
Angela Poole
The Poole Lab studies how factors like substrate availability and host genes influence the dynamics of symbiotic oral and gut microbial communities. Students will conduct in vitro studies on saliva samples to characterize the response of microbes to a panel of carbohydrate substrates. They will use bioinformatics[...] -
Joe Peters
The Peters lab studies microbial evolution via mobile genetic elements. We are interested in how mobile elements evolve new functions within host-associated bacteria. Students in the lab will develop skills in bioinformatics, molecular genetics, and biochemistry. An example student project is using sequencing data to[...] -
Teresa Pawlowska
We study the mechanisms underlying ecological interactions between fungi and bacteria. Student projects will focus on current work to characterize the bacteria associated with mycorrhizal fungi in poorly studied desert habitats in California and Israel. Students will learn culture and microscopy techniques, and phylogenetic analysis. -
Colin Parrish
My laboratory studies viruses, with a particular focus on viruses that have jumped into new hosts to cause epidemics of disease. One model we study is canine parvovirus, which is a cat virus that transferred into dogs in the mid-1970s and subsequently caused a global[...] -
Christopher Myers
My research spans infection biology across scales and systems, utilizing a variety of theoretical and computational approaches, such as: modeling of infectious disease dynamics in complex populations, networks and landscapes; characterizing the structure, function and evolution of cellular networks involved in pathogen virulence and host[...] -
Corrie Moreau
The Moreau lab focuses on the symbiotic factors that drive evolutionary diversification in ants. One example question is whether seed-eating ants have distinct gut microbiomes to facilitate their use of this food source. Students will characterize the gut microbiomes of ant species using 16S amplicon[...] -
Cynthia Leifer
The Leifer lab investigates how the immune system detects and initiates inflammatory responses to microbes. We focus on innate immune macrophages and the regulatory mechanisms that control inflammation through Toll-like receptors (TLRs).