Melissa Duhaime

BWF PUP program: University of Michigan "Integrated Training in Microbial Systems (ITiMS)"

Email: duhaimem@umich.edu

Phone: (734)764-6219 (o)

Personal/Professional Website

Research interests and current projects: Ocean microbes produce half of the oxygen in the air we breathe and drive globally important biogeochemical cycles. Their viruses modulate these cycles through mortality, horizontal gene transfer, and metabolic reprogramming. Virus are known to encode genes involved in photosynthesis, nearly all of central carbon metabolism, nitrogen, and sulfur cycling. Infected microbes are metabolically reprogrammed towards states that enhance viral production, but alter microbial metabolic outputs. However, data describing the the ramifications of these infections on ecosystem function are lacking. We study microbes and their viruses across organizational scales - individuals, populations, communities - and their roles in ecosystem function. This work is rooted in the analysis of large-scale viral/microbial multi-omics datasets (DNA, RNA, proteins, metabolites, lipids), developing model phage-host systems, and state-of-the-art laboratory and field-based study. We seek to elucidate connections between these microbiological oscillators (e.g., viruses and their hosts), their regulation of metabolic pathways and outputs , and their impacts on global biogeochemical cycles, striving to predictively model the intracellular dynamics of phage-host-nutrient interactions and inform multitrophic ecosystem models that now consider the role of viruses.

System of Study: