The Early Life and Microbial Evolution (ELME) Lab at the University of California Santa Barbara opened its doors in July, 2024. We are deeply interested in understanding the evolutionary processes that led to the amazing microbial diversity that we see on our planet today. To do so, we use computational methods from Genomics and Phylogenomics and -omics data to disentangle the evolutionary trends hidden in DNA sequences. We are particularly interested in developing computational pipelines to reconstruct the past history of microbes, discovering and characterizing new groups of microbes, and uncovering the link between microbial evolution and geological events.

Check our Research page for more details on the ongoing projects of the lab!

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NEWS
🔥 12-02-2024: Ivan Moreno has joined our lab as a Postdoctoral Researcher to work with the deep evolution of Cyanobacteria. Welcome, Ivan! We are so lucky to have you 😄
More details about Ivan's research interests and beyond can be found here.

🔥 10-08-2024: Preprint alert! Carolina and postdoc supervisor, Louis-Marie Bobay just published a preprint on the prevalence and evolution of genome rearrangements in microbes. Preprint available here.

🔥 09-30-2024: Carolina was invite to speak at the ENIGMA Seminar Series at Rutgers University (Evolution of Nanomachines in Geospheres and Microbial Ancestors). Recording is available here.

🔥 08-29-2024: Carolina was featured on the podcast Matters Microbial with Mark Martin - Marine Microbial Echoes of Evolution