Katy Heath is an Associate Professor in Plant Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a core member of IGOH at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Heath is an evolutionary geneticist whose research focuses on how plants and plant-associated bacteria and fungi evolve at both the phenotypic and molecular levels. One main line of research focuses on how leguminous plants co-evolve with their nitrogen-fixing rhizobial mutualists, and how this economically and ecologically-important symbiosis evolves in response to the environment. More recently, Heath has become interested in how bacteria evolve by sharing genes rapidly within and across species. Rhizobia have rather large (for bacteria), multi-partite genomes including a chromosome and often one or more large plasmids that carry the symbiosis genes. How these genome elements coevolve, and how different selective environments shape the evolution of these different genome elements is particularly interesting for bacteria like rhizobia, which have quite distinct life history stages in the soil versus in symbiosis with plants. Our work on rhizobium evolution contributes to a larger understanding of bacterial population biology and evolutionary genomics, which are critical for being able to address societal problems like antibacterial resistance, microbiome engineering, and infectious disease.
