Cleves Lab
Principal Investigator: Phillip Alfonso Cleves
Institution: University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Abstract Microbes shape animal physiology, evolution, and can cause or protect against disease. Extensive studies on animal-pathogen relationships have enhanced our understanding of immunity, cell biology, and disease therapies. In recent years, the importance of beneficial microbes in animal health has become clear. However, the complexity of microbes associated with animals has made it difficult to both identify beneficial microbes and to discover the cell biology underlying their benefit, severely limiting progress in the field. These knowledge gaps can be addressed by using simple, genetically tractable animal models with well-defined symbionts. Over the past four years, my lab has developed genetic tools in the small anemone, Aiptasia, that has an intracellular endosymbiotic relationship with dinoflagellate algae. These dinoflagellate algal symbionts are re- established in each generation and reside inside the gastrodermal cells of the animal in a novel phagolysosome- like organelle. Aiptasia is a powerful model for beneficial microbial relationships relevant to biomedicine for several reasons. First, the structure and content of sea anemone genomes are more conserved to human…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R35GM162274-01: Cell and developmental mechanisms of animal responses to intracellular beneficial microbes (2026)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com