Research
My research focuses on the interface of chemistry and biology in animal-microbe symbioses. Symbiosis is a nearly universal feature of life, yet relatively little is known about how symbiotic partners communicate. I aim to bridge the disciplines of chemistry and biology to understand how animal hosts and their microbial symbionts interact, representing a potential source of biological tools with widespread applications including drug discovery and agriculture.
Marine Natural Products
Many chemicals made by bacteria have interesting bioactive properties. Such chemicals, often called natural products, are especially interesting when the microbes that make them live in symbiosis with animals, which are protected from predation by the microbial chemistry. Relative to the plethora of chemicals that microbes produce to interact with each other, natural products evolved from symbiosis and for chemical defense represent more promising drug leads for human disease. During my graduate studies with Dr. Eric Schmidt at the University of Utah, I discovered small molecule natural products from marine sponge and tunicate symbionts that show exciting inhibitory activities against cancer and HIV, and used synthetic biology to engineer laboratory-tractable bacteria to produce them.
Symbiosis
Symbiosis between animals and microbes is extremely widespread in nature, but how hosts and symbionts interact with each other is severely understudied. The relationship between host and symbiont likely varies significantly throughout nature, even among closely related species. Because symbiotic relationships are species-specific, understanding host-symbiont interactions at the biochemical level could lead to species-specific applications. For example, understanding human gut microbes could expose novel targets for treating human disease, while characterizing insect symbionts could reveal an effective mechanism for pest control. During my postdoc with Dr. Nancy Moran at the University of Texas at Austin, I explored how aphids, insects that containing symbiotic bacteria that produce essential amino acids lacking from their diet, modify the chemistry of the symbiont cell wall to control their growth, maximizing the benefits while minimizing the costs of symbiosis.