Research Focus
Dr. Thompson earned a PhD in Microbial Biology from the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California – Berkeley. He is currently a Simons Fellow of the Life Science Research Foundation supervised by Dr. Patrick Shih within the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Biosciences Area.
Dr. Thompson’s research investigates the adaptation of plant associated bacteria to their host, with special focus on the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens. Combining synthetic biology, functional genomics, and phylogenomics he seeks to understand the bottlenecks to Agrobacterium mediated plant transformation in order to engineer more efficient methods to genetically modify elite bioenergy cultivars.
Featured Publications
See Google Scholar profile for complete list
- “Agrobacterium tumefaciens: A Bacterium Primed for Synthetic Biology”, BioDesign Research (2020)
- “Fatty acid and alcohol metabolism in Pseudomonas putida: functional analysis using random barcode transposon sequencing”, Applied and Environmental Microbiology (2020)
- “An iron (II) dependent oxygenase performs the last missing step of plant lysine catabolism”, Nature Communications (2020)
- “Identification, Characterization, and Application of a Highly Sensitive Lactam Biosensor from Pseudomonas putida”, ACS Synthetic Biology (2019)
- “Robust Characterization of Two Distinct Glutarate Sensing Transcription Factors of Pseudomonas putida l-Lysine Metabolism”, ACS Synthetic Biology (2019)
- “Massively parallel fitness profiling reveals multiple novel enzymes in Pseudomonas putida lysine metabolism”, mBio (2019)