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.