Jeffrey A. Lewis, PhD

All organisms must endure diverse environmental stresses during their lifetime. Our lab seeks to understand how microbes adapt and even thrive in the face of various environmental assaults. Microbial stress responses are remarkably complex, coordinating multiple levels of sensing, signal transduction, and global regulatory networks. Thus, stress research feeds into nearly all aspects of cell biology, with implications for human disease, microbial pathogenesis, and the evolution of regulatory networks.

Our group studies stress responses through the perspective of natural variation. Inarguably, model organisms have provided fundamental insights into basic biology. However, most of our knowledge derives from a small number of domesticated lines—we lack a detailed knowledge of the ecology and phenotypic diversity of different individuals within the same microbial species. With the advent of genomic technologies, we are now uniquely poised to perform comparative genomic studies on wild microbial strains. We use these powerful new approaches, as well as classical genetics and biochemistry, to generate novel insights into the regulatory logic and function of stress signaling and defense.