John McCutcheon

Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
jmccutch@email.arizona.edu
Ph: (520) 784-1304
Fax: (520) 621-3709
Mailing address: P.O. Box 210088, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0088

• Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
• Publications

The goal of my research is to understand the factors that produce and maintain interactions between animals and their associated microbial communities.

Recent work has focused on genomic studies of the nutritional intracellular symbionts of sap-feeding insects. These bacteria provision nutrients that are missing in the highly specialized diets of the insects. In collaboration with my post-doc advisor, Nancy Moran, I have sequenced genomes from a number of phylogenetically diverse symbionts. This work has revealed a remarkable level of metabolic complementarity between co-resident symbionts in the same insect, and clear patterns of convergent evolution between symbiont pairs in distantly related insects. Additionally, these symbionts have the smallest cellular genomes known, blurring the once-clear distinction between organelle and autonomous bacterial life.

I will be starting as an assistant professor in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Montana in Missoula in the summer of 2010. I encourage students interested in symbiosis and/or microbial diversity to contact me about possible positions in the lab.