James R. Henriksen

I am currently a graduate student in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Georgia in the lab of Dr. Barny Whitman. I received my B.S. degrees in Biochemistry and in Microbiology from the University of Oklahoma.

Complete CV: pdf or html

I am interested in using molecular techniques to understand elemental cycling by environmental microorganisms.

For my graduate work I am investigating genes involved in DMSP degradation in Silicibacter pomeroyi, a marine heterotroph, and the role of this microbial activity in marine systems. DMSP is a ubiquitous marine compound whose degradation is important in carbon and sulfur cycles and influences global climate due to its degradation product DMS.

I have pursued a differential display proteomic approach, finding proteins whose abundance incresed when chemostat cultures of Silicibacter pomeroyi were grown with DMSP as the sole carbon source. I am investigating the function of these upregulated genes using gene knockout and other genetic techniques I have developed for this environmental organism.

With the increasing amount of biological and sequence data available, bioinformatic techniques are becoming increasingly important for microbiologists. I use a variety of tools, from linux shell scripts and programing languages (Perl and Python), to the BLAST suite, the R statistical language, and other specialized programs, to investigate biological questions. Making these tools accessible to all researchers, regardless of their skill-set, is important to me. For instance, I wrote a web-based front end to the Libshuff program to allow simple statistical testing of ribotype abundance from different environments.