Molecular Environmental Microbiology

Our laboratory is committed to understanding how bacteria that inhabit natural niches sense and process multiple environmental signals into distinct responses –both at the level of single cells and as a community. Unlike laboratory settings, in which growth conditions can be controlled and changed one at a time, bacteria in the environment must perpetually make decisions between activating metabolic genes for available, frequently mixed C-sources and those for escaping or adapting to physicochemical stress.