Chris Mackenzie
Assistant Professor-Research
Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics
The University of Texas Health Science Center
United States of America
Biography
My Ph.D. research was on the light-harvesting antenna complexes of photosynthetic bacteria. This work was jointly supervised by Richard Cogdell and Kim Kaiser in the UK. After a short postdoctoral fellowship, which involved isolating genes involved in Drosophila behavior, I moved to the US and returned to working with photosynthetic bacteria. This work was carried out in the lab of Samuel Kaplan in this department. Our work was among the early genome projects and focused on sequencing Rhodobacter sphaeroides 2.4.1 and using bioinformatics to examine novel regulatory pathways in this organism. My current research focuses on the possible link between Streptococcus gallolyticus and colon cancer, a project I share with my spouse, Yi Xu at Texas A&M.
Research Interest
My current research interests lie with the possible connection between Streptococcus gallolyticus and colon cancer and how bioinformatic methods may be used to guide experimental approaches in the lab.
Publications
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Pappas CT, Sram J, Moskvin Ov, Ivanov PS, Mackenzie RC, Choudhary M, Land ML, Larimer FW, Kaplan S, Gomelsky M. Construction and validation of the Rhodobacter sphaeroides 2.4.1 DNA microarray: transcriptome flexibility at diverse growth modes. J. Bacteriol. 2004; 186: 4748-58.
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Goldman BS, Nierman WC, Kaiser D, Slater SC, Durkin AS, Eisen JA, Ronning CM, Barbazuk WB, Blanchard M, Field C, Halling C, Hinkle G, Iartchuk O, Kim HS, Mackenzie C, Madupu R, Miller N, Shvartsbeyn A, Sullivan SA, Vaudin M, Wiegand R, Kaplan HB. Evolution of sensory complexity recorded in a myxobacterial genome. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2006; 103: 15200-5.
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Mackenzie C, Eraso JM, Choudhary M, Roh JH, Zeng X, Bruscella P, Puskas A, Kaplan S. Postgenomic adventures with Rhodobacter sphaeroides Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2007; 61: 283-307.
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Barbu EM, Vannakambadi KG, Shivasankarappa G, Mackenzie C, Foster TJ, Sudhof TC, Hook M. β-Neurexin is a ligand for the Staphylococcus aureus MSCRAMM SdrC. PLoS Pathogens. 2010; 6(1):e1000726.
