This week we profile a recent publication in Nature Communications from Dr. Steven Hallam at the University of British Columbia.
Can you provide a brief overview of your lab’s current research focus?
My research intersects microbial ecology, biological engineering and bioinformatics with specific emphasis on the creation of functional screens and computational tools that reveal hidden metabolic powers of uncultivated microbial communities. The laboratory has developed MetaPathways, a modular annotation and analysis pipeline to predict metabolic interactions from environmental sequence information. Other research areas include single-cell genome sequencing and biosensor development for environmental monitoring and high-throughput enzyme discovery.
What is the significance of the findings in this publication?
A recent press release can be found here, which does a good job of summarizing the significance of the findings.
What are the next steps for this research?
We are interested in developing enrichment or cultivation approaches needed to directly test the hypotheses proposed in the manuscript. We also want to integrate our findings into a recently developed pathway-centric numerical model describing coupled biogeochemical cycling in the Saanich Inlet water column. We use Saanich Inlet as a model ecosystem for studying microbial community responses to ocean deoxygenation. We are very interested in increasing public awareness relation to ocean deoxygenation and how climate change is increasing this process on a global scale.