evolution in action
Able to gobble up pollution, ward off garden pests, and make plants grow, the group of bacteria known as Burkholderia could be considered eco heroes. Or, they could threaten your life. Should we worry that the beneficial bugs will mutate into arch villains? The answer is written in their genealogy, if you can read it.
"A billion years ago, these were all the same critter; they share a family tree, but some are now on different branches," says Vaughn Cooper, a UNH assistant professor of microbiology who studies microbial evolution. "Predicting whether the beneficial ones could become harmful depends on how well we understand how the genes that make others cause disease got to be that way."
What it boils down to is watching evolution in action— analyzing how the genome of one species differs from another, and how they change from one generation to the next. Bacteria’s ability to crank out six or more generations in one day make it uniquely suited to this kind of study. The challenge lies in how to analyze the data when each genome contain up to nine million bits of DNA.
What's an evolutionary microbiologist to do? Collaborate. With the support of a President's Award for Excellence, Cooper leads an interdisciplinary team of UNH computer scientists and biologists working to create new tools to analyze staggering amounts of genetic information.
"Using computer science to analyze genomes revolutionized the study of bacterial evolution; you can identify which genes are shared by groups and watch how fast they evolve," says Cooper. "We're refining algorithms for much faster detailing of genomic sequences, and pairing these with user-friendly interfaces to analyze gene interaction."
Cooper hopes the project will help provide a deeper understanding of how different species of Burkholderia cause disease, clean up pollution, or help crops grow. Decoding the genetic changes that produced such diversity, he believes, will foreshadow how they might evolve in the future. And reaching that understanding relies on how well biologists and computer scientists, trained in different fields, speaking different languages, can focus on a common goal.
Download the full Research Annual Report(PDF)