Karna Gowda

Karna Gowda

Karna Gowda

Assistant Professor of Microbiology

gowda.51@osu.edu

(614) 688-3830

900 Riffe Building
496 W. 12th Ave

Areas of Expertise

  • Microbial Ecology & Evolution
  • Quantitative biology
  • Applied Mathematics

Education

  • B.S., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Ph.D., Northwestern University
  • Postdoc, University of Chicago

Affiliations

Research

Microbial communities are the engines that drive the biosphere, playing critical biochemical roles in ecosystems and hosts, from soils to oceans to the human gut. The sequencing revolution radically expanded our ability to describe how the structure and functions of communities vary with environments. However, our understanding of underlying processes and mechanisms lags far behind, limiting our ability to predict the microbial impacts of climate change and rationally design consortia for the benefit of humanity.  

The Gowda Lab looks through the lens of physiology (i.e., the integrated study of microbial metabolism, gene expression, and growth) to understand how environments shape and constrain communities. We do this by combining measurements of microbial physiology with communities in the lab, with an emphasis on quantitative methods and mathematical frameworks for understanding and contextualizing these data. The goal of the lab is to develop new conceptual and mechanistic foundations for connecting the environments in which communities reside with their emergent behaviors. 

Projects in the lab include:

  1. Uncovering physiological origins of metabolic specialization in bacterial denitrification
  2. Discovering consequences of N and P nutrient limitation on the dynamics of heterotrophic communities, 
  3. Disentangling gene-expression and population turnover components of community dynamics in the global surface oceans, and 
  4. Developing single-cell approaches for characterizing microbial physiology in natural environments. 

Recent Publications:

  • Diaz-Colunga J, Skwara A, Gowda K, Diaz-Uriarte R, Tikhonov M, Bajic D, and Sanchez A. Global epistasis on fitness landscapes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378, 20220053 (2023).  

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