Karna Gowda
Assistant Professor of Microbiology
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:
- Uncovering physiological origins of metabolic specialization in bacterial denitrification,
- Discovering consequences of N and P nutrient limitation on the dynamics of heterotrophic communities,
- Disentangling gene-expression and population turnover components of community dynamics in the global surface oceans, and
- Developing single-cell approaches for characterizing microbial physiology in natural environments.
Recent Publications:
- Crocker K, Lee K, Chakraverti-Wuerthwein M, Li Z, Tikhonov M, Mani M, Gowda K, and Kuehn S. Environmentally-dependent interactions shape patterns in gene content across natural microbiomes In press at Nature Microbiology (2024).
- Skwara A, Gowda K, Yousef M, Diaz-Colunga J, Raman A, Sanchez A, Tikhonov M, and Kuehn S. Statistically learning the functional landscape of microbial communities. Nature Ecology & Evolution 7, 1823–1833 (2023).
- 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).
- Gowda K, Ping D, Mani M, and Kuehn S. Genomic structure predicts metabolite dynamics in microbial communities. Cell 185, 530–546 (2022).
- Gopalakrishnappa C, Gowda K, Prabhakara K, and Kuehn S. An ensemble approach to the structure-function problem in microbial communities. iScience 25, 103761 (2022).
- Fraebel DT, Gowda K, Mani M, and Kuehn S. Evolution of generalists by phenotypic plasticity. iScience 23, 101678 (2020).