About Our Lab
Comprising most of the tree of life and constituting a major source of human disease, microbes are the most diverse organisms on earth. Armed with large population sizes and a multitude of ways to create sudden and dramatic changes to their genome, microbes are a fount of adaptive potential.
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Our research is focused on how microbes adapt and diversify in novel complex environments. Among other environmental factors, these changes may be influenced by nutrient availability or limitation, spatial homogenization or structure, and the presence or absence of community members. ​
Major topics that our lab investigates include:
Bacterial adaptation in response to fluctuating
resources and stressful environments.
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Effects of environment and microbial life history on genetic and epigenetic mutation rates.
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Genetic drivers of stable subpopulation structure in experimentally evolving Escherichia coli populations.
Ecology and evolution of microbial interactions in the
small intestine and urogenital microbiome. ​
The Behringer Lab is affiliated with the Department Of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University, the Department of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the Vanderbilt Microbiome Initiative, and the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology, and Inflammation.
