The major topics currently under investigation in our laboratory are

• endosymbiosis and endosymbiotic gene transfer
  
• the origin and evolution of anaerobic energy metabolism in eukaryotes
  
• the evolution and compartmentation of biochemical pathways in eukaryotes
  
• the general process of plant evolution as viewed with molecular markers
  

Those topics are outlined in slightly more detail below. At the moment we are particularly interested in endosymbiosis and the origin of eukaryotes. This is an important topic that goes back 100 years. I translated Mereschkowsky's seminal 1905 paper on this topic from German into English, it is a very worthwhile read and can be downloaded here. A review summarizing the majors issues that we currently recognize at the forefront of the field of eukaryote origins is available here. Sometimes I get requests for various figures that have appeared in my papers, click here to view and download from the current gallery. For whatever reason, people often ask me "Where did the nucleus come from?" — my critique of existing models and my own alternative model can be found in a paper published in 1999 (PDF).

Our experimental tools in the laboratory are

• standard biochemistry (enzyme purification, kinetic studies, etc.),
  
• standard molecular biology (cloning, sequencing, gene expression analysis, PCR),
  
• analysis of active enzymes overexpressed in E. coli or other systems,
  
• cell fractionation and organelle isolation (for proteomics and enzyme localization),
  
• molecular evolution at the computer (phylogeny, gene and genome analysis, bioinformatics),