Michael Sadler
University of Washington, School of Oceanography, PhD.
Mike is a PhD student in the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography. As a laboratory technician at a local wastewater treatment plant—where he monitored and improved effluent quality—he learned that environmental protection is far more complex than simply keeping water “clean.” Effective conservation must balance science, budgets, regulations, and diverse community interests. Driven to tackle those multifaceted challenges, Mike volunteered with the Snohomish County Marine Resources Committee and later returned to UW to deepen his expertise in ocean science.
Mike now focuses on SAR11, tiny bacteria that are the most common life-forms in the sea and key players in the ocean’s carbon cycle. He explores how these microbes evolve, how viruses shape their populations, and how the whole system may shift as the oceans warm.
Projects
The Role of Viruses in Shaping SAR11, the World’s Dominant Marine Bacteria
Viruses form evolutionary relationships with their hosts and have likely existed as long as life itself. These relationships can be brief and deadly, or long and mutually beneficial. My research investigates the role of viruses in shaping microbial evolution using marine bacteria that are ubiquitous in the ocean. I perform this work by culturing novel marine microbes and by leveraging advances in DNA sequencing technology to explore the prevalence and dynamics of long-term virus-host relationships. By using a natural virus free and virus-host model for infection and microbial physiology studies, I also try to understand how stable these relationships are in a changing climate and what that instability might mean for ocean health.
Bacterial viruses (orange) attached to a membrane vesicle produced by a SAR11 cell (grey)