Current projects
Our primary research goal is to unravel the bacterial metabolism of one-carbon compounds such as methane, methanol, formaldehyde, and formate. Current projects range in focus from solving fundamental questions in metabolism to the development of sustainable biological systems for energy production and agricultural development. These projects include:
ONE CARBON METABOLISM
Identifying and understanding the metabolic network around C1 molecules can drastically improve current microbial platforms for sustainability such as converting lignin into value-added products.
Plant-microbe interactions
The effect of lanthanide-dependent metabolism in microbial rhizosphere and phyllosphere communities remains unclear. Our preliminary data suggests that bacterial-lanthanide biochemistry enhances the growth of crops.
Lanthanide Biochemistry
Until recently, scientists thought that lanthanides could not have a catalytic role in biology. We know now that this is not true, and their usage may surprisingly be extremely wide-spread in nature. Our goal is to identify and characterize the ways in which the cell traffics and utilizes lanthanides.
Biometallurgy
We are actively engineering strains and developing strategies to efficiently and selectively recover lanthanides from recycled sources using methods ranging from engineering megaplasmids to coopting bacteriophages.
CMG Lab 