Adaptations in Biofilms: From Clinics to Climate Change

Interactions between bacteria, their close competitors, and viral parasites are common in infections, but understanding of these eco-evolutionary dynamics is limited. The environment can also influence the evolutionary outcomes of disease, together making the pathways of resistance and adaptation in a host difficult to predict. In our group, we study how opportunistic pathogens growing in the biofilm environment can lead to unanticipated mechanisms of host and antimicrobial resistance. Biofilms are populations of microorganisms attached to a surface and are usually encased in extracellular polymeric substances that protect the microbes from a number of challenges. Biofilms are the predominant lifestyle of bacteria in nature, yet how this lifestyle effects evolutionary outcomes in a variety of settings, from clinical to environmental, is understudied. We use experimental and genomics work to explore how microbial populations evolving in different lifestyles alter evolutionary trajectories and use this information to ultimately predict how bacteria will respond to stressors like antibiotics and host defenses.

Dr. Chris Marshall is an Assistant Professor at Marquette University in the Department of Biological Sciences. Dr. Marshall earned his bachelor's degree from Virginia Tech majoring in Environmental Science. He then earned both his Master's and Ph.D. from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. During his time at MUSC, Dr. Marshall studied several aspects of applied and environmental microbiology with Dr. Hal May. Following his Ph.D., Dr. Marshall won the prestigious Argonne Director's Fellowship at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago to work on microbiomes with Dr. Jack Gilbert. Dr. Marshall then took a Research Assistant Professor position at the University of Pittsburgh studying the evolution of antibiotic resistance in high priority pathogens with Dr. Vaughn Cooper. Dr. Marshall joined Marquette University as a tenure track faculty in the Fall of 2019. He has over 35 publications, 2 published patent applications, and is an editor for the journal mSystems.