Microbial ecology, microbial cellular biology, evolution of a novel bacterial developmental system and microbial phylogeny.
Interest in bacterial stress pathways, with a special interest in peptidoglycan remodelign in Vibrio cholerae.
Microbial physiology with a focus on how ribosome quality control impacts cell fate; genetic screens, ribosome profiling, biochemical and structural studies.
Environmental microbiology, microbial ecology, physiology, and biogeochemistry.
Environmental microbiology; metabolism of man-made pollutants, with specific applications to environmental toxicology.
Microbial physiology with a focus on Bacillus subtilis. We study physiological and genetic responses elicited by cell envelope stress (e.g. antibiotics), oxidative stress, and metal ion limitation and excess.
Host-microbe interactions, Bacterial genomic evolution, Ecology of microbiomes.
Marine microbiology; biogeochemistry, diversity, and distribution of marine microorganism; metagenomics and metatranscriptomics.
Chromosome integrity (Transposition; DNA Replication, Recombination and Repair); Functional Genomics.
Electron transport proteins of bacteria, in particular those proteins involved in the anaerobic respiration of nitrogen oxides.
Use Agrobacterium tumefaciens as a model to study how cells detect other cells; this plant pathogen detects a variety of chemical signal molecules released from host plant cells and also uses a type of bacterial pheromone called an autoinducer to estimate its population densities.
Our laboratory studies microorganisms, particularly anaerobes, which carry out chemical transformations. Present areas of interest include physiology and molecular biology of nitrogen fixation in methanogenic archaea and ecology and physiology of microbial reductive dechlorination of toxic chemicals.