Jonathan A. Eisen

Research Interests

Diversity of Microbes and Microbiomes

A major area of emphasis in my lab is in the study of the ecology, evolution and function of microbes and microbial communities. Our work in this area includes topics such as those listed below:

• The genomic basis for the origin and evolution of new functions.
• The ecology and evolution of microbial communities.
• The co-evolution of microbes and their carrying vessels (i.e., hosts).
• Variation in “evolvability.”
• The development of phylogeny-driven computational tools to analyze genomic and metagenomic sequence data.

Current and Recent Lab Projects (examples)

• Microbiology of the Built Environment. http://microbe.net. My lab is interested in the microbial ecology of the "built environment" - that is, the places humans have created such as buildings, vehicles, water systems, etc. We do both research and communications activities in this area.
• Seagrass Microbiomes. http://seagrassmicrobiome.wordpress.com. One of our major research topics is on the microbial communities that live in and on seagrasses and how they contribute to the evolution, ecology, and function of these important plants and their surrounding ecosystems. 
• Istmobiome. https://istmobiome.net. We are collaborating with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to study microbiomes of organisms on the two sides of the Panamanian Isthmus. 

Open Scientific and Scholarly Communication 

Another major interest in my group is in scientific and scholarly communication. I am deeply committed to the opening up of scholarly communication such as by improving access to literature, data, and tools and also by communicating more with the public outside of the "normal" scholarly literature through blogging, Twitter, and other means.  

Center Affiliations

• Genome Center
• Center for Population Biology

Graduate Program Affiliations

• Population Biology Graduate Group
• Biophysics Graduate Group
• Integrative Genetics and Genomics Graduate Group