Department Environmental Microbiology

Microbial invasions pose a critically important and long-standing problem in microbial ecology (e.g., establishment of pathogens, spread of antibiotic resistance genes, establishment of pollutant-degrading microorganisms, etc.). Demographic factors are important for invasion success, but our understanding about how microbial demography affects the invasion process remains limited. This is largely because we lack methodological advances for quantifying microbial demography.

Here, we are developing a novel chromosomal barcoding method to a) quantify the proportion of an invasive population that contributes to invasion success, and b) track the fate of individual lineages. We are further applying the method in an experimental proof-of-principle where we will investigate the invasion of an antibiotic resistant population into a sensitive population (and vice versa). Our method is potentially applicable to a wide variety of projects and could benefit a wide range of interests in microbial invasions.