Last week, Jessica (Jess) Sutter successfully defended her thesis titled “Phylogeny, pangenomics, and predicted functional diversity of maize rhizosphere Pseudomonas”. The work of Jess investigates a phenomenon observed in a study of the maize rhizosphere microbiome in a field study conducted in three fields in New York State in 2010, where an intriguing observation was made that the abundance of the Pseudomonas genus increased in abundance during the second half of the growing season, to comprise well over 50% of the sampled diversity. By generating shotgun metagenome data, Jess was able to perform a very in-depth phylogenomic analysis of the rhizosphere Pseudomonas and generated the most comprehensive dataset of soil Pseudomonas yet available. Her thesis presents the results of these phylogenomic analyses and predicts the functional diversity of maize rhizosphere Pseudomonas.
Congratulations Dr. Sutter!