MARTINY LAB

Welcome to the Martiny Lab

Our lab studies the origin and maintenance of microbial diversity and its consequences for ecosystem functioning. Our research focuses on the evolutionary and ecological mechanisms that generate variation in microbial communities (microbiomes) and how this variation affects ecosystem processes. When possible, we use experimental approaches in the lab and field to disentangle the role of different mechanisms driving microbiome variation. Most of our work considers bacterial diversity, but we are also partial to virus and fungal diversity. To answer our questions, we apply molecular genetic, culturing, and bioinformatic approaches to characterize microbial diversity along with field work and metadata analysis to understand the link between genetic diversity, microbial traits, and ecosystem functioning.