WELCOME TO THE HERMAN LAB!
There are two very different projects ongoing in the Herman laboratory.

The main reseach question of the lab is to link responses of living systems to environmental change at the genetic level. The question is, which genes are most important for how organisms respond to the environment. Our approach is to implement projects that meld the disciplines of genetics and ecology in the discipline of Ecological Genomics. The Herman Lab is part of a multidisciplinary group that is investigating the genetic basis for the changes in nematode species composition in response to environmental cues. We use genomic approaches such as transcriptomics and next generation sequencing techiniques to discover ecologically important genes and study their functions. The long-term goal of this project is to discover which genes are induced or repressed in response to variations in resource availability. Our current focus is on interactions of bacteria-feeding nematodes with their biotic environment, specifically bacteria!

The other has long been a focus of research in our lab and concerns the control of cell polarity in developing systems using the nematode, C. elegans as a model. We are studying cell polarity in the free-living soil nematode Caenorhabditis elegans because it has a small number of cells, all of which can be seen in the light microscope, and is amenable to genetic analysis. The overall goal of this project is to understand how cell polarity is generated and maintained during animal development. Our approach is to identify and study genes involved in the control of cell polarity by identifying mutations that disrupt the polarities of individual cells. Much of our work has focused on the role Wnt signaling pathways play in the control of cell polarity. Our current work aims to discover how signaling pathways interact with the centrosome to control cell polarity in developing tissues.

We are located in the Division of Biology at Kansas State University.

We are part of the Program in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCDB) as well as the KSU Ecological Genomics Institute.