Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Lab website: http://yehlab.stanford.edu/
Cellular symbioses
Environmental microbiology
Microbial ecology
Synthetic biology/ bioengineering
Diatoms, algae, non-model organism biology
Our research program focuses on understudied microbial ecology as solutions for planet health. Evolution was a prolific experimenter… too bad it kept such a gawd-awful lab notebook! (You know the kind with missing pages, post-it note patch jobs…) But the results of these experiments are everywhere around us. Shouldn’t we learn from millions of years of experiments (that’s a lot of PhD/postdoc stints)? If only we would look beyond metazoan, human-centric biology, we would discover a world of innovation. Not only is this functional diversity beautiful and awe-inspiring on its own, they could serve as blueprints for solutions to our environmental challenges and the basis for a new era of synthetic biology.
There’s a ton of functional diversity out there to explore, so let’s get going! We are currently working on nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria and algae, genetic screens in diatoms, and algal biofuels.
