Dr. Haney was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Plant Microbiome Interactions
Author: haneylab
September 2016
The Haney Lab welcomes Lab Manager Joël Richard, visiting PhD student Kishore Vishwanathan and postdoctoral fellow Ryan Melnyk.
Haney Lab at ASM Beneficial Microbes with posters by Polina Beskrovnaya, Frank Liu, and Christina Wiesmann.
May 2016
The Haney Lab welcomes UBC Microbiology undergrads Polina Beskrovnaya, Frank Liu, and Gloria Han. The Plant Microbiome and Dr. Haney featured in BioScience.
March 2016
The Plant Microbiome and Dr. Haney featured on the cover of Microbe Magazine
February 2016
The Haney Lab starts at UBC
The Plant Microbiome
Plants roots are surrounded by communities of microbes (i.e. the “rhizosphere microbiome”); these microbes influence plant growth, development, and disease resistance. Using the model plant Arabidopsis and its associated bacteria, such as Pseudomonas fluorescens, our lab studies the genetic and environmental factors that regulate plant-microbiome associations.
Our current projects are focused on:
- Uncovering how microbes, including P. fluorescens, can colonize a host despite the presence of an intact immune system.
- Identifying plant genes that shape microbiome community.
- Identifying bacterial and plant genes that affect the functional outputs of the microbiome.
- Identifying conserved mechanisms across Pseudomonas species that are required for association with diverse hosts.
Plants shape their associated microbes into communities that are distinct from surrounding soil. This figure shows the relative enrichment and depletion of certain bacterial phyla in the Arabidopsis rhizosphere (inner circle) relative to the starting community in bulk soil (outer circle).