My Ph.D. research applies culture-independent molecular genetic and computational biology techniques to elucidate the diversity and drivers of the Canadian lake microbiome across large spatial and temporal scales in an era of accelerated environmental change.
We reconstructed over 1,000 bacterial genomes from 308 surface water metagenomes from lakes in 12 Canadian ecozones. Our article linking bacterial genomospecies diversity to lake resource availability and watershed land use is available at doi:10.1038/s41564-023-01435-6.
We traced the distributions and environmental drivers of protists and their metabolic strategies in 366 freshwater lakes using 18S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Our article is available at doi:10.1128/msystems.00316-22.
Check out my Three Minute Thesis describing the power of paleogenetics to travel back in time:
Paleogenetics is a field of research under intense development, especially as applied to lake sediments. We pioneered a novel application of shotgun-metagenomics to detect preindustrial microbial diversity in lake sediments. Our article describing this method and our discovery of bacterioplankton and viruses preserved in sediment metagenomes is available at doi:10.1128/mSphere.00512-20. Watch my invited seminar to the Sedimentary Ancient DNA (sedaDNA) Scientific Society on this topic:
The IISD-Experimental Lakes Area is an iconic whole-lake experimentation facility in western Ontario. We are analyzing sediment cores from experimentally fertilized lakes to track the effects of eutrophication on microeukaryotic diversity across 50 years.
As a graduate trainee in the NSERC Canadian Lake Pulse Network, I had the fantastic experience of performing a full day of sampling for over 90 lakes in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland & Labrador in 2018, then in British Columbia in 2019. More information on LakePulse and its sampling campaign targeting 664 lakes across Canada can be found here.
In 2022, I participated in the Microbial Diversity summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Six phenomenal weeks of microbiology learning were spent in lecture room and lab with a star line-up of faculty and TAs and 19 outstanding classmates. My individual Mini Project was a realization of a grad school dream: to explore microbial magnetotaxis.
Watch as the MMB are drawn to the south pole of a magnet positioned on the stage of a phase-contrast microscope:
MMB (in the cantina)! Watch as they perform "escape motility":
Video credit to Sarah Guest (Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis and MicDiv TA), who thankfully insisted on filming this last magnetotaxis assay and permitted me to false-colour the video and set it to cantina music (:
Huge thanks to Team MicroMagneto for their incredible help and enthusiasm!