Evolutionary Bioenergetics Lab

Research

How respiratory pathways, mitochondrial function, and genome interactions shape organismal performance, stress tolerance, and evolutionary change.

Research overview

How do organisms power life when conditions change?

Our research program is rooted in hypothesis-driven biology that treats bioenergetics as a bridge between molecular mechanism and evolutionary outcome. We focus on respiratory pathways, mitochondrial function, stress physiology, and the evolutionary dynamics of mitochondrial and nuclear genomes.

Genome history

Respiratory physiology

Ecological stress

Evolutionary outcome

Research area 1

AOX evolution and physiology in animals

Alternative oxidase, or AOX, provides an alternate terminal branch of the mitochondrial electron transport chain. In many eukaryotes, AOX can alter how electron flow responds to respiratory stress. Our lab asks why this pathway appears in some animal lineages, how it functions physiologically, and what its presence means for animal ecology and evolution.

Current and developing work includes soil animal bioenergetics, functional integration of horizontally acquired AOX, AOX distribution across the tree of life, and the broader hypothesis that AOX confers metabolic flexability that supports evironmental stress tolerance.

Questions we care about

When and how has AOX been retained, lost, or horizontally acquired in animals?
Does AOX improve performance under hypoxia, chemical inhibition, microbial exposure, or other respiratory challenges?
Can AOX change the selective landscape experienced by mitochondrial and nuclear OXPHOS genes?

Research area 2

Fungal pathogen bioenergetics

Fungal pathogens experience variable and often harsh environments as they move among hosts, substrates, and external conditions. Temperature, pH, oxygen, nutrients, immune responses, and antifungal stress all challenge respiratory metabolism.

We study how respiratory pathway architecture, including AOX, contributes to fungal metabolism, respiratory stress tolerance, and host-pathogen interactions. This work includes fungi associated with amphibians and reptiles, with a longer-term goal of understanding how bioenergetics shapes disease ecology in changing environments.

Questions we care about

Does AOX help animal-associated fungi tolerate respiratory inhibition or environmental stress?
How do mitochondrial pathways influence fungal growth, persistence, and host interaction?
Can pathogen bioenergetics improve predictions about disease dynamics under environmental change?

Research area 3

Pollinator bioenergetics

Pollinators face intense energetic demands. Flight, foraging, thermoregulation, development, overwintering, and thermal stress all place pressure on mitochondrial systems. We are developing pollinator bioenergetics as a major lab direction that links physiology to ecology and conservation-relevant stress.

Current interests include bumble bee foraging bioenergetics, mitochondrial correlates of division of labor, and thermal stress physiology in the alfalfa leafcutting bee, Megachile rotundata.

Questions we care about

How does mitochondrial function differ among pollinator tissues, life stages, or behavioral roles?
How do heat and cold stress alter mitochondrial performance?
Can bioenergetic traits help explain variation in pollinator performance under environmental stress?

Research area 4

Mitonuclear coevolution

Oxidative phosphorylation depends on proteins encoded by both mitochondrial and nuclear genomes. This split genetic architecture creates an evolutionary partnership problem: mutations in one genome can alter the functional context of the other.

Our work tests how mitochondrial and nuclear genomes remain integrated, whether nuclear compensation explains patterns of molecular evolution, and how changes in mitochondrial physiology alter evolutionary dynamics.

Questions we care about

How tightly do mitochondrial and nuclear OXPHOS genes coevolve?
When does molecular coevolution reflect compensation versus shared constraint or relaxed selection?
How do physiological changes feed back into genome evolution?

Connected prior and continuing work

Honest signaling, sexual selection, and carotenoids

Earlier and continuing work examines the physiology and evolution of animal color displays, including carotenoid metabolism, condition dependency, and honest signaling. These projects remain conceptually connected to the lab’s broader interest in how physiological pathways create evolutionary constraints and opportunities.