Michael Frederick Dunn

Functional Genomics of Prokaryotes Researcher

Associate Professor

Academic history

Michael F. Dunn earned his Bachelors of Science in Biology from Delaware Valley University (Doylestown, PA) in 1985. He worked for two semesters as a student intern in the plant tissue culture laboratory of Dr. Robert Zacharias at the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Eastern Regional Research Center (ERRC) (Philadelphia, PA) and returned to the ERRC in 1985 to work as a technician in the bacterial phytopathology lab under Dr. William Fett. He began his doctoral work with Dr. Arthur Karr in the Plant Pathology Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1987 and was awarded his Ph.D in 1992 with a thesis entitled “Characterization of an extracellular polysaccharide depolymerase produced by Bradyrhizobium japonicum“. He began his post-doctoral research with Dr. Jamie Mora at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Nitrogen Fixation Research Center (CIFN) in 1992. Here he initially focused on studying carbon metabolism (Kreb’s cycle and anaplerotic reactions, the glyoxylate shunt, and polyhydroxybutyrate synthesis) in the nitrogen-fixing bacteria Rhizobium etli and Sinorhizobium meliloti. As an Associate Researcher (1994-96) he focused on biotin metabolism in R. etli and characterized its pyruvate carboxylase, an enzyme that is still used biochemical and structural model for this class of biotin-dependent enzyme. He was a founding member of the Mexican Proteomics Society and collaborated in the first proteomic studies carried out in Mexico during the early years of the 21st Century, studying global metabolic protein expression in R. etli. In 2004, the CIFN became the Center for Genomic Science (CCG) and he became a tenured Research Professor in 2006. He focused on the functional genomics of rhizobial carbon metabolism for the remainder of that decade. In 2009, he was invited to collaborate with the Drs. Graciela Huerta and Karina Navarro of the Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Unidad Tapachula to study antibiotics and degradative enzymes produced by newly isolated bacterial biocontrol agents. Around this time, his interest in rhizobial metabolism shifted from carbon to nitrogen, specifically to studying the genetics and biochemistry of ornithine and arginine synthesis in S. meliloti. His current research is aimed at defining the roles of bioactive compounds called polyamines, which are derived from ornithine in S. meliloti. He and his students have discovered key points in the regulation of ornithine and polyamine biosynthesis, and are currently extending their biochemical characterization of the polyamine biosynthesis pathways and determining the effect of these compounds on gene transcription.

Links

OrcID
Scopus