Title:
Of Chance and Necessity: Vignettes of Synthetic Ecology
Abstract:
My lab is interested in understanding the "rules of the game" for how microbes symbiose or interact in a persistent fashion and form stable communities that perform specified functions. Of particular interest is how such microbial interactions first form and evolve, and the role of the physicochemical environment in influencing these processes. This seminar will be in two parts. First, I will describe a suite of obligate mutualisms that I created between free-living fungi and algae based on a simple carbon:nitrogen metabolic exchange circuit. I will present the logic of my approach and share some results exploring the robustness, dynamics, and phylogenetically breadth of this capacity for mutualism. I will also describe our collaborative work to discover fungal-algal interactions in the wild and their relevance to the evolution of land plants. Second, I will briefly describe our ongoing efforts to elucidate the activity and nature of a marine cyanobacterium culture that produ
ces secondary metabolites of therapeutic value and of yet unknown chemical ecology relevance in coral reef ecosystems.