Dean Pettinga

The paper reduces a sorghum synthetic microbial community to identify a stable, growth-promoting variant that enhances flavonoid production and plant growth through dynamic gene expression and metabolomic changes.

This study identifies strain-specific functional diversity in Streptomyces endophytes under drought stress, showing enrichment does not correlate with plant growth promotion.

This study uses host-mediated selection to improve rice drought tolerance by identifying beneficial microbial communities and their associated functions.

This study demonstrates that a defined synthetic microbial community can enhance sorghum growth in both lab and field settings, despite losing diversity in native environments.

This study integrates metabolomics and RNAseq from the same liver samples to show that prior metabolite extraction does not harm RNAseq quality and reveals pyrimidine metabolism as a key pathway in acute viral infection.

This study shows that paternal dietary sugar affects offspring gene expression through sperm piRNA pathways, linking small RNA regulation to intergenerational epigenetic inheritance.

This paper introduces circle-damage-seq, a method to map DNA damage at nucleotide resolution genome-wide, demonstrating its application to UVB-induced CPDs and 4-hydroxynonenal-induced adducts.