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.