30 July 2018

Gateway to Antarctica

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Gateway to Antarctica

Summons lab member Emily Matys searches around the globe to reveal the secrets of microbial life by Fatima Husain Matys in Antarctica. Photo Credit: Emily Matys To reveal the complex secrets of microbial life, MIT EAPS PhD candidate and Summons lab member Emily Matys travels around the globe. Matys analyzes lipids — oils, waxes, and […]

9 July 2018

Putting the microbiome on the map

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Global Microbiome Conservancy scales up by Fatima Husain Researcher Ainara Sistiaga shares food processing methods with a Hadza woman and her child. Photo credit: Christopher Corzett As global human gut microbiome diversity dwindles, a non-profit collaboration between scientists around the world is racing to collect, catalog, and preserve the full biodiversity of human gut bacteria before […]

25 June 2018

3 Questions: Roger Summons on finding organic matter on Mars

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NASA’s Curiosity rover has found evidence of complex organic matter preserved in the topmost layers of the Martian surface, scientists report today in the journal Science. While the new results are far from a confirmation of life on Mars, scientists believe they support earlier hypotheses that the Red Planet was once clement and habitable for […]

14 November 2017

“Mummies” tummies to reveal digestive evolution

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Dr. Ainara Sistiaga from the Summons Lab was recently interviewed by Horizon Magazine on the evolution of human diets.  By studying mummies, researchers want to establish how our gut bacteria has changed over time. Image credit – ‘MNH – Mumie Frau 1’ by Wolfgang Sauber is licenced under CC-S.A 3.0 Mummified bodies from Egypt and […]

14 November 2017

48-Million-Year-Old Wax Discovered in a Bird Fossil

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  (The photographs above showing the location (a) and detail of the preserved uropygial gland (b: before sampling in the unprepared fossil; c: after sampling in the prepared fossil.)   A recent study by postdoc fellow Shane O’Reilly from Summons Lab on fossil organic molecules provides palaeontologists with important new insight into how animal soft […]

18 September 2017

The Summons Lab bids farewell to a talented lab member and welcomes several new members

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Dr. Xiaolei Liu has been a postdoctoral associate and a research scientist in Roger’s lab for the last 3 years. Xiaolei received his PhD degree at the University of Bremen with Dr. Kai-Uwe Hinrichs. Afterwards, he continued in the same lab before joining the Summons Lab in 2014. Xiaolei has contributed significantly to this lab […]

23 June 2017

Latest Summons Lab Research

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The front cover of the latest issue of Journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology featured the research work from Summons Lab on the synthesis of methylated hopanoids by cyanobacterium Nostoc punctiforme ATCC 29133S. This work discovered that by deleting the hpnP gene, Nostoc Punctiforme is not able to synthesize all 2-methylhopanoids, however, it produces much higher […]

15 March 2017

Summons Lab Latest Research Highlights

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Summons Lab recent research features two publications in Nature and PNAS with funding support from the Simons Foundation Origins of Life Collaboration program. Recently, David Gold published his paper entitled “Paleoproterozoic sterol biosynthesis and the rise of oxygen” in Nature. Sterol biosynthesis signals aerobic metabolic processes by eukaryotes. However, there has been debates on the earliest […]

11 March 2017

Summons Lab 2017 Retreat

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Summons Lab group retreat was held in Jackson, NH. This lab retreat brought together most of current lab members and a former lab member, Shane O’Reilly. Everyone shared their on-going research, all with common objectives in attempting to better understand earth history. Topics were broad and spanned origin of life to modern biogeochemical processes. The […]

15 September 2016

The Summons Lab bids farewell to several talented and valuable lab members!

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Dr. Ross Williams has been a PhD researcher in Roger’s lab for the last 5 years. Ross recently received his PhD degree in Geochemistry at MIT. His research focus has been on paleoenvironment reconstruction in extreme climates ranging from Early Cenozoic lignite deposits in India to modern day high elevation lakes of the Chilean Altiplano. […]