Karna Gowda
Contact Information
Assistant Professor of Microbiology
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 functions in ecosystems and hosts, from soils to oceans to the human gut. The Gowda Lab's guiding star is the pursuit of natural design principles underlying these functions. Our view is that, by understanding how microbial physiology, ecology, and evolution conspire to “build” community functions, we will learn how to rationally manipulate and design complex microbiomes for the benefit of human health.
The Gowda Lab is an interdisciplinary team of researchers who use experiments with organisms and synthetic communities, statistical learning, and dynamical systems modeling approaches in the pursuit of natural design principles for microbial community functions. We try always to remain close to natural systems through collaborations with field scientists and bioinformatic investigations of environmental 'omics datasets.
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. Nature Microbiology 9, 2022-2037 (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).