THOMAS NIEHAUS

Assistant Professor
Department of Plant and Microbial Biology

PhD, Plant Physiology, University of Kentucky

tniehaus@umn.edu
http://niehauslab.umn.edu/

Research Interests

Metabolic biochemistry in plants and microbes; processes through which organisms extract, store, and convert energy and chemicals to achieve life. Biochemical and genetic techniques such as phenotypic analysis of knockouts in model plant and/or microbial organisms, assaying recombinant enzymes, metabolomics, etc.

Bio

Thomas Niehaus studies metabolism, which is foundational to all of life and underpins key areas of biology including synthetic biology, human health, stress tolerance, and aging. His lab seeks to use a variety of bioinformatic and comparative genomics tools to predict the metabolic function of unknown genes. The Niehaus lab tests these predictions using biochemical and genetic techniques such as phenotypic analysis of knockouts in model plant and/or microbial organisms, assaying recombinant enzymes, metabolomics, etc.