About

This is the home of the Bagby Lab at Case Western Reserve University.

Microbes are creatures of their environments. Pressure, temperature, irradiance, fluid flow, the chemistry of solutes and surfaces: all of these, and the scales over which they vary, can factor into the best way to structure a membrane, harvest energy, build biomass, and safely sample genetic variation. In turn, the strategies microbes adopt feed back into local ecosystems and global biogeochemical cycles. We study the interplay between environmental variables and the regulation, evolution, and spread of microbial and viral functional innovations that have the potential to shape and reshape the Earth system. Our lab uses fieldwork and bioinformatics to describe microbial communities and processes in situ; experimentation, with ecological, microbiological, and biochemical methods, to identify and characterize the molecular innovations that mark these communities; and ecoinformatics to understand the impact of these communities on the Earth system.

We are part of the DOE-funded VirSoil collaboration and the NSF-funded EMERGE Biology Integration Institute.