The Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology's weekly Plant Pathology 250 seminar series is presented this week by Dr. Paul Carini from the University of Arizona 

Seminar Title: "Developing microbial culture collections to understand the complex phenotype of actinobacterial desiccation (and rehydration!) tolerance"

Biography: Our lab investigates  the myriad of ways microbes living in the wild (soil, water and air) affect Earth processes and our health. In particular, we are focused on understanding how microbes help make Earth habitable for humans. This view leads us to diverse questions in both terrestrial and aquatic environments with the goal of understanding how microbial communities transform important nutrients, remove pollutants, affect soil fertility and influence aquatic productivity. By studying the growth of microbial cultures, their genome sequences and their environmental distributions, we design experiments that help uncover new and unusual biogeochemical cycles and provide hypothesis-based explanations for long standing geochemical observations.

Faculty Host: Sydney Glassman; sydney.glassman@ucr.edu