Research

Microbial ecology
Until recently the number of microbial species studied and known was only 2% of all currently estimated microbial species. This means that there is still much to learn about the microbial world. I am currently studying and analyzing the patterns of microbial interactions at a global scale using publicly available 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing data from metagenomic environmental sequencing. Many interesting insights can be acquired through such analysis, a few examples are: the identification of microbial communities, or of antagonistic relationships between microbes, and the better understanding of factors influencing the evolution of microbes.
Microbial genome evolution
Microbial genomes are known to have a high density of genes and both observational and experimental evidence have shown that microbial genomes quickly lose non-essential genes. It is straighforward to understand why the reduction of non-functional dna regions could have a positive effect on fitness. What is less clear is the mechanism by which some microbes maintain large genomes and maintain many non-essential genes.
Engineering of microbial metabolism
Evolution of multicellularity and symbiosis/cooperation