Jeffrey Barrick

jbarrick@cm.utexas.edu

Research Group

Barrick Research Group

Education

B.S., California Institute of Technology, 2001
Ph.D., Yale University, 2006
Postdoctoral Fellow, Michigan State University (2006-2010)

Awards

NIH Pathway to Independence Award
NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics
RNA Society/Scaringe Young Scientist Award
Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship

Affiliations

Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology
Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology

Research

We use experiments with microorganisms, nucleic acids, and digital organisms to study evolution in action with the ultimate goal of understanding and harnessing evolution as a creative force. To ask how different types of mutations impact evolutionary potential, we are using deep sequencing to monitor the competitive dynamics of spontaneous beneficial mutations in these populations and also engineering specific genomic changes. Systems biology and biochemistry approaches are used to link the effects of mutations on cell physiology to how they affect competitive fitness at the organism level, and bioinformatics and comparative genomics are used to investigate whether similar mutational pathways are important in nature. Other research interests include investigating the functions of cryptic genomic elements and using mark-recapture techniques on microbial genomes to watch them as they evolve in the context of complex wild and pathogenic communities.

Representative Publications

Woods, R.J.*, Barrick, J.E.*, Cooper, T.F., Shrestha, U., Kauth, M.R., Lenski, R.E. (2011) Second-order selection for evolvability in a large Escherichia coli population. Science 331:1433-1436. *equal contributions

Jerome, J.P., Bell, J.A., Plovanich-Jones, A.E., Barrick, J.E., Brown, C.T., Mansfield, L.S. (2011) Standing genetic variation in contingency loci drives the rapid adaptation of Campylobacter jejuni to a novel host. PLoS ONE 6:e16399.

Barrick, J.E., Kauth, M.R., Strelioff, C.C., and Lenski, R.E. (2010) Escherichia coli rpoB mutants have increased evolvability in proportion to their fitness defects. Mol. Biol. Evol. 27:1338-1347.

Barrick, J.E.*, Yu, D.S.*, Yoon, S.H., Jeong, H., Oh, T.K., Schneider, D., Lenski, R.E., and Kim, J.F. (2009) Genome evolution and adaptation in a long-term experiment with E. coli. Nature 461:1243-1247. *equal contributions

Barrick, J.E. and Breaker, R.R. (2007) The structures, distributions, and mechanisms of metabolite-binding riboswitches. Genome Biology 8:R239.