Welcome to the Sullivan Lab (a.k.a. The Tucson Marine Phage Lab)
We're a new lab (since Jan 2008) in Life Sciences South (LSS 203 and 207). PI Matt Sullivan has a primary appointment in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, and a joint appointment in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department where we are housed.
Through the use of (meta)genomics, we query 'wild' viral populations to identify important hypotheses that can be evaluated using model-system approaches. The lab is focused in three primary research areas:
- Model systems development (Cyanophages and "Heterophages")
- Tools development (The Biosphere 2 Ocean Project)
- Field work
- Viral biogeography: Project OViD: Ocean Virus Diversity in the context of the Tara Oceans and Malaspina global oceanographic research expeditions
- Coastal to open ocean transects (the subarctic North Pacific Ocean, LineP; MBARI's Line67)
- Extreme environments (3km deep hypersaline pools)
The marine cyanobacteria Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus are globally important primary producers. In spite of their small size, these cyanobacterial cells are numerically dominant over vast areas of the "desert oceans" and are significant contributors to global carbon cycling. The viruses of cyanobacteria–cyanophages– impact marine cyanobacterial diversity through mortality and moving genes through the host population. Find out more about our research...
