Postdoctoral Research Associate: Experimental Co-Evolution of Microbial Mutualisms

The Hom Lab at the University of Mississippi (UM) is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to further develop a model experimental system for observing microbial mutualisms evolve in real time. Funded by a new NSF award and connected to an ongoing collaboration with the Kryazhimskiy Lab at UC-San Diego, this project uses synthetic microbial communities, custom strain engineering, lineage tracking, and long-term experimental evolution to ask how cooperative species interactions originate, stabilize, diversify, and fail.

The work will build on the study by Venkataram et al. (2023) Nat Ecol Evol 7:143–154 and the synthetic mutualism created in the Hom Lab between Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Saccharomyces cerevisiae . The postdoctoral associate will extend this system to dissect how microbial ecosystems co-evolve under con...