Anthony Amend
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Ecology & Evolution
Microbes live almost everywhere: in soil, streams and seawater, and inside plants, insects and people. Yet most microbial species have never been described, and scientists still know little about how these hidden communities, called microbiomes, shape the health of their hosts and the flow of energy through ecosystems.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
Biology
- Topics
microbiome
yeast
fungi
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- Isolate and formally describe hundreds of new Pucciniomycotina yeasts from Hawaiian plant, animal and environmental samples and from zoo animals, using genome sequencing, physiological data and culture traits.
- Test whether Pucciniomycotina yeasts evolved alongside their animal hosts, and use the new diversity data to predict global species numbers, host and habitat specificity, and diversity hotspots.
- Build transfer-learning models, trained on large datasets like the Earth Microbiome Project, that predict how food chain length and an animal's feeding level relate to its microbiome diversity.
- Test those predictions in a four-level bromeliad food web with controlled numbers of levels, and in a three-level mosquito system whose microbial partners are isolated and manipulated.
- Use genomic data to explain how host-associated microbes change their hosts' metabolic abilities and so alter energy transfer efficiency in food webs.
- Determine how environmental gradients across Hawaiʻi, from mountain to sea and urban to rural, shape microbial community assembly and host and human health, using invertebrate models and clinical research.
More about the research
Using the steep environmental gradients of the Hawaiian Islands, from mountain to sea and from city to countryside, the lab's projects ask three linked questions. What fungi exist? How do microbes change food webs? How do environmental microbiomes connect to human health?
Why it matters
Better catalogs of yeasts could improve the identification of fungal pathogens and the hidden species in plant and animal microbiomes. Knowing how microbes control food web efficiency may eventually let people adjust microbial communities to help restore degraded habitats, capture carbon, and raise yields in agriculture, aquaculture and biofuel systems. The center's work on environmental microbiomes aims to show how microbial variation affects human health in Hawaiʻi and beyond.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: PurSUiT: Global Diversity, Distribution and Evolution of Pucciniomycotina Yeasts Inferred from a Tropical Oceanic Hotspot
NSF · Jan 2025 – Dec 2028
Integrative Center for Environmental Microbiomes and Human Health
NIH · Aug 2018 – Jul 2028
MIM: Using Machine Learning and a Model Watershed to Understand how Microbes Govern Food Web Architecture and Efficiency
NSF · Jan 2022 – Dec 2026
Closest labs
Kent Hatch
New College of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Test the relative importance of environmental filtering, host selection, spatial connectivity, microbial competition, cospeciation and host switching in shaping marine invertebrate microbiomes, using models from evolutionary and metacommunity ecology.
Seth Newsome
University of New Mexico, NM·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether gut microbes in wild banner-tailed kangaroo rats make essential amino acids and short-chain fatty acids that hosts absorb, using compound-specific isotope tracing and metatranscriptomics.
Liana Burghardt
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Identify which legume host traits support which rhizobial bacteria by analyzing plant characteristics and field samples from legumes, using traditional and AI-enabled image and statistical analysis.
The school
University of Hawaii at Manoa: 23 labs on PI Pages, $376M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
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