Microorganisms play major roles in globally relevant biochemical cycles (e.g., carbon or nitrogen). However the vast majority of Bacteria and Archaea cannot be grown and studied in isolation. We are interested in characterizing the functional contributions of microbial communities. To this end we are developing in in vitro and in silico methods to improve our understanding of microorganisms, their interactions and their metabolism.

The methods we devise and tools we employ span a wide field. The in vitro methods range from the construction of stable microbial consortia to high quality DNA sequencing and the in silico methods range from ultra-high-throughput annotation of environmental sequence data to metabolic model construction.