Research

My research generally focuses on the interactions of microbes with each other and their environment, especially the organic carbon pool. I utilize phylogenetic approaches to try to understand how these interactions shape the evolution of the enzymatic repertoire encoded in microbial genomes. This allows me to potentially reconstruct when and within which bacterial clade certain enzymes evolved, if they spread horizontally to other microbial lineages, or duplicated within a microbe’s genome. Through this, my goal is to develop hypotheses on why certain enzyme-families mass-duplicate within the SAR202 bacteria. I then want to experimentally verify the hypotheses that result from my theoretical work using cell culture-based approaches. I conduct my experiments in the laboratories at OSU and during fieldwork at the Bermuda Atlantic Timeseries Study site in the North Atlantic Ocean as part of the BIOS-SCOPE project funded by the Simons Foundation International.