Monday August 28

Cameron Thrash

Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, USA

Cameron Thrash began his career working in biomedical science at The Scripps Research Institute. He attended the University of California, Berkeley for his Ph.D. where he worked on anaerobic microbial metabolism and bioremediation in the lab of John D. Coates. He later received a NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology to study the genomics underlying diversification of the most abundant bacterioplankton clade, SAR11, at Oregon State University with Stephen J. Giovannoni. Since 2013, he has been an Assistant Professor at LSU where his lab uses cultivation, genomics, and metagenomics/transcriptomics to understand microbial functions in a variety of aquatic systems including estuaries and marine regions of hypoxia.

Hunting microbes upon the coastal sea

Microorganisms catalyze the bulk of biogeochemical cycling reactions. However, the functions of the majority of microbial taxa remain obscured because of their vast diversity, a lack of cultivated representatives for many groups, and the technical difficulties of connecting metabolic properties to specific taxa in situ. Cultivation remains the best means to experimentally determine the roles microorganisms play in the environment and the factors that influence their ecology. We developed defined media to match the varied coastal environments in the northern Gulf of Mexico and utilized high-throughput cultivation to procure new microbial isolates during a sustained three year campaign. This talk will discuss our approach, the results of the three year effort, and examples of what we can learn by obtaining important, and previously uncultivated, bacterioplankton in the laboratory.

Read more Cameron Thrashes research here

Host: Sarahi L Garcia (sarahi.garcia@ebc.uu.se)