Matthew Bakker

Research in my group supports the productivity and sustainability of crop agriculture. We study organisms that cause disease in plants, particularly Fusarium graminearum, causing fusarium head blight in wheat and barley. One of the key challenges with this pathogen is that it contaminates grain with a toxic metabolite, introducing a food safety risk. We are also investigating how soil microorganisms process fertilizers (both nitrogen and sulphur) into plant-available forms. We use a wide range of methods in these studies, from genomics and metagenomics, amplicon sequencing and qPCR, to HPLC and ELISA.

I teach MBIO 4482: Microbes in Our Environment in the fall term, MBIO 2230: Introductory Biogeochemistry in the winter term, and I contribute to MBIO 7040: Graduate Microbiology for MSc students.

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