Projects

• 

  Molecular characterization of genome conformation in rhizobium symbionts of clover

  Core Project

  Researchers study how mutualism between legumes and nitrogen-fixing rhizobia drives evolutionary differentiation. They explore genome architecture and gene expression using Hi-C and RNA-seq.

Publications

• 

  Sanath-Kumar et al, 2025

  Sanath-Kumar, R., Rahman, A., Ren, Z., Reynolds, I. P., Augusta, L., Fuqua, C., Weisberg, A. J., & Wang, X. (2025). Linear dicentric chromosomes in bacterial natural isolates reveal common constraints for replicon fusion. bioRxiv.

  https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.02.23.639760
• 

  Baglivo et al., 2024

  Baglivo, I., Malgieri, G., Roop, R. M. 2nd, Barton, I. S., Wang, X., Russo, V., Pirone, L., Pedone, E. M., & Pedone, P. V. (2024). MucR protein: Three decades of studies have led to the identification of a new H-NS-like protein. Molecular Microbiology, 00, 1-14.

  https://doi.org/10.1111/mmi.15261
• 

  Mishra et al., 2024

  Mishra, A., Hughes, A. C.. Amon, J. D., Rudner, D. Z., Wang, X., & Kearns, D. B. (2024). SwrA-mediated multimerization of DegU and an upstream activation sequence enhance flagellar gene expression in Bacillus subtilis. Journal of Molecular Biology, 436 (4), 168419.

  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2023.168419
• 

  Barton et al., 2023

  Barton, I. S., Ren, Z., Cribb, C. B., Pitzer, P. E., Baglivo, I., Martin, D. W., Wang, X., & Roop, R. M. (2023). Brucella MucR acts as an H-NS-like protein to silence virulence genes and structure the nucleoid. mBio, 14(6), Article e02201-23.

  https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.02201-23
• 

  Ren et al., 2023

  Ren, Z., Takacs, C. N., Brandão, H. B., Jacobs-Wagner, C., & Wang, X. (2023). Organization and replicon interactions within the highly segmented genome of Borrelia burgdorferi. PLoS Genetics, 19(7), Article e1010857.

  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1010857