Tammy Haselkorn, Ph.D.

Education:

Ph.D., Section of Ecology, Behavior, & Evolution, Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, 2010
Started at UCA in 2016

Courses Taught:

Bioinformatics
Genetics
Advanced Ecology
 

Research Interests:

My research uses ecological, genetic, and genomic approaches to understand the complex relationships between bacterial symbionts and their eukaryotic hosts. I am interested in characterizing the diversity of bacterial symbionts and the ways they affect their hosts’ ecology and evolution, specifically Spiroplasma symbionts of Drosophila and Burkholderia and other symbionts in the social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum. My goal is to develop a model system to understand the factors that drive the formation and maintenance of a mutualism between bacteria and their hosts.

Selected Publications:

DiSalvo, S., T.S. Haselkorn, U. Bashir, D. Jimenez*, D. Brock, D.C. Queller, and J.E. Strassmann. 2015. Burkholderia bacteria infectiously induce the proto-farming symbiosis of Dictyostelium amoebae and food bacteria. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 112: E5029-E5037.
Haselkorn, T.S. and J. Jaenike. 2015. Macroevolutionary persistence of heritable endosymbionts: acquisition, retention, and expression of adaptive phenotypes in Spiroplasma. Molecular Ecology 24: 3752-3765.