Seaweed represent a 6 billion dollar industry across the world, and are a source of many materials spanning the chemical and food sectors. Understanding how seaweeds construct these molecules will allow us to harness their biosynthetic machinery in the biomanufacturing of fuels, lubricants, polymers, and other commodity and specialty chemicals. To help us understand the… [Read More]

The non-photosynthetic, predatory cyanobacterium Vampirovibrio chlorellavorus (Melainabacteria) is a globally important obligate pathogen of Chlorella species/strains of interest as biofuel feedstocks. This project proposes two sequencing approaches to generate information for querying: (i) pathogen and host genomics; and, (ii) the mode of infection and host reaction to infection via transcriptomics); and, (iii) explore evolution and… [Read More]

Long-term warming results in significant changes in respiration, community structure and microbial processes. The primary goal of this project is to separate molecular changes resulting from long-term warming from temperature effects of gene expression using samples just prior to the power returning and the week afterwards when the soil temperature is again 5ºC higher than… [Read More]

The quality of water that leaves the watershed is impacted by soil microbial communities that will be studied here. The research will target regions along the East River, a tributary of the Colorado River, focusing on three subsystems: the river corridor and hillslopes and consider effects of time of year, depth below the surface and… [Read More]

DNA methylation is a fundamental epigenetic modification that plays a critical role in genome function in eukaryotes. This proposal will study the function of N6-methyladenine (6mA) in early divergent fungi because it is more abundant than in other eukaryotes and seems to regulate gene expression. The function will be studied in the context of responses… [Read More]