Projects

Stress and Stability

I'm interested in how environmental stress shapes how likely/quickly microbes can return to their original communities (i.e., stability). Previously, I've demonstrated how environmental stress reshapes the way microbial taxa associate with each other which can impact the stability of these important, understudied communities. I am currently exploring how the Stress Gradient Hypothesis (more stress promotes more facilitation) as an overarching framework to understand microbiome dynamics and stability.

Genetic Mechanisms of Context Dependency

Context dependency is often used to explain that species interactions are different in different environmental conditions. While, there is a plethora of literature untangling ecologically meaningful reasons why these differences occur (e.g., Biological Market Theory), we often times don't know how these interactions change in response to different environmental conditions. In this project, I develop an evolutionary mechanistic framework in the model plant-arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis (~450 million years old mutualism) in which I determine whether expansion/retention of mycorrhizal-specific gene families in plants play outsized roles in the context dependency of this association. My preliminary work analyzing gene expression in plants grown with/without mycorrhizae and with/without environmental stressors supports that symbiosis-specific gene expansion disproportionately impacts genetic pathways in a context-dependent manner.

Single-Cell Microbe Sequencing

Single-cell sequencing has revolutionized our understanding of how diverse cells are in multicellular organisms. A major goal in microbial ecology is to extend single-cell sequencing strategies in prokaryotes. However, prokaryotic mRNA lacks the poly-A many single-cell sequencing strategies used in eukaryotic systems employ to enrich for functionally meaningful gene expression. To overcome this, I am developing a new depletion strategy to remove uninformative RNA (e.g., rRNA) to allow for ultra high-throughput (>100 000 cells) sequencing in prokaryotes.