Welcome to the McCutcheon lab
Division of Biological Sciences, University of Montana
No organism
exists alone. Bacteria, no matter where they live, must cope with the
presence of huge numbers of other bacteria competing for the same space.
Animals are coated, both in and out, with complex communities of
microorganisms. Sometimes these interactions benefit one or more of the
partners, and become stable in evolutionary time. They become symbioses.
We are interested in how and why symbioses form, how they are
maintained, and what happens as the associations become more and more
intertwined.
We work with a number of symbioses, including sap-feeding insects and
their endosymbiotic bacteria, ambrosia beetles and their ectosymbiotic
fungi, and the consortia of fungal and photosynthetic partners that form
lichens. We use a variety of approaches—genomics, microscopy,
molecular biology, molecular evolution, biochemistry, and field
biology—to address our questions.
Please look around our site, in particular at the publications and people
pages, to learn more about who we are and what we do, and feel free to
email us with questions.