Angela Oliverio
Syracuse University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Microbiomes, the communities of microbes living together in places such as the human gut, a sourdough starter, or a hot spring, are shaped both by interactions among species and by evolution happening inside them. The human microbiome influences health, and its disruption has been linked to inflammatory bowel disease, allergies, and inflammatory skin conditions.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
- Topics
microbiome
microbial ecology
experimental evolution
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jan 2031
What they work on
- Measure how strain diversification and horizontal gene transfer affect microbiome assembly and function, using experimental evolution of synthetic sourdough and other fermented food communities.
- Identify the genomic mechanisms behind species and gene diversification in multispecies communities, using long-read sequencing, comparative genomics, transcriptomics, and genetic screens.
- Determine how fermented food microbiomes from sourdough, kombucha, and fermented vegetables reassemble when mixed (community coalescence), using co-culture interaction assays, metabolic modeling, RNA sequencing, and targeted metabolomics.
- Test how adaptation to environmental conditions and to other microbes constrains or promotes cross-community invasion, using experimental evolution.
- Describe new species of Amoebozoa and Heterolobosea amoebae from geothermal springs and define species boundaries, using single-cell profiling, culturing, and microscopy.
- Analyze gene families in hot-spring amoebae to identify likely adaptations to high temperature and low pH, and improve reconstructions of the eukaryotic tree of life.
More about the research
Much less is known about how evolution within a community, or the mixing of whole communities, changes how a microbiome assembles and what it does. The lab tackles these questions mainly with simplified microbial communities built from fermented foods, which are easy to manipulate in the lab yet behave like natural microbiomes. A separate project explores the hidden diversity of single-celled eukaryotes in geothermal springs.
Why it matters
Principles of how microbiomes evolve and mix could help researchers understand shifts toward unhealthy gut, skin, and oral microbiomes linked to inflammatory bowel disease, allergies, and skin inflammation. They could also improve the engineering of medically and industrially important microbial communities, including those containing probiotic species. Surveys of hot-spring protists will improve estimates of eukaryotic biodiversity and add strains to public collections.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Identifying fundamental principles of evolutionary dynamics in multispecies microbiomes
NIH · Apr 2026 – Jan 2031
Collaborative Research: PurSUiT: The diversity and evolution of extremophilic microbial eukaryotes
NSF · Mar 2025 – Feb 2028
Collaborative Research: Mechanisms of community coalescence in synthetic microbiomes
NSF · Mar 2024 – Feb 2027
Closest labs
Freddy Bunbury
University of Chicago, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify genome features, such as amino acid frequencies and gene content, that predict the optimal growth temperature of cyanobacteria, using thermophilic hot-spring strains.
Todd Treangen
Rice University, TX·Computer Science·Early-career
Identify yet-unseen pathogens by linking taxonomy-based classification of sequences with genes whose functions are of concern, so that novel threats can be recognized in sequencing data.
Javier Tabima Restrepo
Clark University, MA·Ecology & Evolution
Reconstruct the evolutionary relationships among Basidiobolus species, using genome sequences from fungal samples collected around the world.
The school
Syracuse University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $199M a year on research, 168 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.