The overarching theme of my laboratory is microbial discovery in the environment and human microbiome. We uncover novel microbial life forms by inventing novel cultivation strategies that depart from conventional wisdom and provide access to the greatest part of microbial diversity: unexplored species missed in the past. We study properties of new environmental and medically important microorganisms, and their strategies of survival. We are especially interested to know how microbial cell reacts to unfavorable conditions, survives environmental challenge, and decides when and where to start dividing and form a new successful population. We are intrigued by the phenomenon of microbial individuality: ability of isogenic cells to be phenotypically different. We are fascinated by signaling and cooperative interactions between and within populations, - interactions that integrate microbial species into multifunctional units analogues to multicellular organisms. We are also involved into several aspects of applied microbiology, and explore the importance of newly discovered species in human health, their potential for bioremediation and alternative fuel production, and ability to produce bioactive compounds. And we are excited to learn about patterns of microbial distribution on our planet, in a search for places in the biosphere where the opportunities to discover new microbes are the greatest.
Articles
Environmental rRNA inventories miss over half of protistan diversity (with Sunok Jeon, John Bunge, Chesley Leslin, Thorsten Stoeck, and Sunhee Hong), Biology Faculty Publications (2008)
Background
The main tool to discover novel microbial eukaryotes is the rRNA approach. This approach...
Protistan diversity in the arctic: a case of paleoclimate shaping modern biodiversity? (with Thorsten Stoeck, Jennifer Kasper, John Bunge, Chesley Leslin, and Valya Ilyin), Biology Faculty Publications (2007)
Background
The impact of climate on biodiversity is indisputable. Climate changes over geological time must...
New cultivation strategies bring more microbial plankton species into the laboratory (with Stephen J. Giovannoni, Rachel A. Foster, and Michael S. Rappé), Biology Faculty Publications (2007)
Occurrence and distribution of diverse populations of magnetic protists in a chemically stratified coastal salt pond (with Dennis A. Bazylinski, David R. Schlezinger, Brian H. Howes, and Richard B. Frankel), Biology Faculty Publications (2000)
Chemical stratification occurs in the water columns and sediments of many aquatic habitats resulting in...
Enumeration of sandy sediment bacteria: are the counts quantitative or relative? (with D. Alexander, K. Cosman, A. Dompé, S. Gallagher, J. Jarsobski, E. Laning, R. Martinez, G. Panasik, C. Peluso, R. Runde, and E. Timmer), Biology Faculty Publications (1997)
Several tests were carrled out to enable evaluation of the precision with which sandy sediment...