Home

  • Escherichia coli

    Escherichia coli cells with fluorescently labeled chromosomal loci. 

  • Field Work

    Many genes that organisms use to regulate their mutualists are also used to defend against parasites and pathogens. The shared genetic control of beneficial and harmful symbioses raises the intriguing possibility that susceptibility to infection is a pleiotropic cost of mutualism. Our goal is to understand how a genetic tradeoff between attracting mutualists and repelling parasites has shaped the genomic architecture of traits mediating species interactions, and how ongoing conflict influences adaptation. 

  • Bacterial Respiratory Complex

    Structural model of a bacterial respiratory complex III: remember that when you respire, your complex III perspires to produce your body's energy.

  • Malaria parasites

    Malaria parasites (and their kin) can be viewed as minimal eukaryotes, harboring a nucleus (yellow), a secretory pathway the Golgi (purple) and specialized ‘rhotpry’ organelle (black), and two endosymbiotic organelles, the mitochondrion (red) and apicoplast (green).

  • Consequences of HD-ZIPIII dysregulation

    How do organisms create such complex and beautiful shapes? And how do they do it so reproducibly? Plants are an excellent system to study these questions. For instance, the HD-ZIPIII family of transcription factors are >700 million years old and regulate nearly all aspects of plant development. Consequences of HD-ZIPIII dysregulation on plant morphology are severe (pictured here). Understanding how HD-ZIPIII proteins work is a central theme of the lab.

Biology is fundamental to our changing world. The 21st century challenge for our students, our scholars, and the greater society is to understand our place in this changing world and to create fundamental knowledge for informed policies, economies, and social structure.

Upcoming Events



Synthesizing Biological Sequences Designed by Generative Models at Petascale

Dr. Eli Weinstein
- | Fagin 116 and Zoom

Abstract: Generative models offer a powerful paradigm for designing novel functional DNA, RNA and protein sequences. In this talk, I introduce a method to efficiently synthesize designs from generative models in the…



Generative neural network methods for evolutionary inference

Dr. Sara Mathieson
- | Leidy 109 and Zoom

Abstract: Generative AI has captured a worldwide audience with novel text, image, audio, and video. In evolutionary biology we have used synthetic data for decades, for modelling, theoretical…



Integrative models of 3D nuclear DNA organization

Dr. Anupama Jha
- | Fagin 116 and Zoom

Abstract: DNA is compactly packed in the nucleus of a cell; around…