Dr. Cara Haney received her PhD from Stanford University, studying rhizobia-legume symbiosis. She conducted her postdoctoral work at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she developed model systems using Arabidopsis-Pseudomonas to study plant-microbiome and host-pathogen interactions. She started her independent research position at the University of British Columbia in 2016, and moved her lab to Pitt's Department of Biological Sciences in 2023.
Members of the bacterial genus Pseudomonas form mutualistic, commensal, and pathogenic associations with diverse hosts. The prevalence of host association across the genus suggests that symbiosis may be a conserved ancestral trait and that distinct symbiotic lifestyles may be more recently evolved. Our lab studies Pseudomonas interactions with diverse hosts spanning beneficial to pathogenic lifestyles. Using the model plant Arabidopsis and associations with diverse Pseudomonas strains, our research focuses on several questions:
- What are the components of the core genome that predispose clades of bacteria to host-association?
- Which genes drive lifestyle transitions from beneficial to pathogenic?
- How to hosts regulate the outcome of symbiotic interactions?
Our goal is to identify molecular mechanisms that determine that outcome of host-microbe interactions and determine whether the outcomes will be beneficial or harmful, with implications ranging from medicine to agriculture.