Penunuri, G. (BMEB) – Genomic, Proteomic, and Computational Approaches to the Study of Host-Microbe Systems
Host-microbe systems are core to some of biology’s most consequential interactions, from the pathogens that drive infectious disease to symbionts affecting agricultural pest control and vector-borne disease transmission. Yet unlike the model organisms that have driven most of modern molecular biology, the microbes at the center of these interactions are rarely genetically tractable: many cannot be cultured outside a host, resist standard tools for genetic manipulation, and are annotated largely by homology to distantly related free-living relatives. This dissertation develops genomic, proteomic, and computational methods to work around this lack of infrastructure and contribute techniques and tools to the study and […]