Tyrrell Conway

     Conway serves as Principal Investigator and Director of the Oklahoma Center for Microbiome Research (OCMR), an NIH-funded Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE). Microbiome science is one of OSU's strategic research priorities. The OCMR-COBRE provides mentoring and financial support to five research project leaders and the newly created Microbiomics and Culturomics Core Facility (MCCF). The MCCF provides anerobic culturomics services to OCMR members and the scientific community accross Oklahoma.

     Research in the Conway laboratory centers on the physiological state of colonized Escherichia coli in the mammalian large intestine. We use transcriptomics and mass spectrometry together with more traditional approaches to ask how E. coli colonizes the large intestine. The data illuminate cellular processes -- nutrition and niche availability -- that are important for colonization and pathogenesis. The research involves testing of hypotheses in the mouse model, as opposed to working with laboratory cultures. Importantly, we found that different E. coli biotypes compete for different sugars in the intestine, suggesting a mechanism for the succession of E. coli strains in healthy individuals and infection by E. coli pathogens that must overcome the colonization resistance barrier imparted by the resident E. coli. Subsequently, we established that different E. coli biotypes occupy distinct niches in the intestine that allow strains to co-colonize. In addition, we learned that E. coli must respire oxygen to be competitive in the intestine. This finding suggests that E. coli scavenges oxygen to create anaerobic conditions that favor growth of the anaerobes that dominate the intestinal microbiota. More recently we explored and characterized this symbiotic relationship between E. coli and the anaerobes that degrade complex polysaccharides, which in turn release simple sugars to cross-feed E. coli. We call this symbiosis of intestinal microorganisms "the restaurant hypothesis". Building on our effort to characterize the functional roles of individual microbes in the human microbiome we recently discovered the primary source of nitrogen used by E. coli to colonize is L-serine. In the bioinformatics laboratory, our focus is on development of intuitive displays for the functional genomics data warehouse to provide a computational environment for knowledge and discovery. Our single-nucleotide resolution operon map of E. coli serves as a community resource. Conway is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.

Research Interests:

Microbiome, Metabolism, Physiology, Microbiology, Bacteriology, E. coli, enterohemorrhagic E. coli, Intestinal colonization, Microbial ecology, Genetic control circuits, Growth rate control, Stringent response, Transcriptomics, Acid tolerance, Entner-Doudoroff pathway, Metabolic Engineering, Zymomonas mobilis, Bioinformatics