Olga Zhaxybayeva
Associate Professor
Appointments
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science
Simons Foundation Investigator in Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems
Area of Expertise
microbial evolution,
bioinformatics,
computational genomics,
phylogenetics
Biography
My research interests are to understand how microbes change over time. Recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies brought us an avalanche of data: thousands of genomes and terabases of environmental DNA (metagenomes). I mine these data sets to assess the impact of horizontal gene transfer on microbial populations, find new ways to characterize microbial communities, and track down genomic signatures of microbial adaptations.
Education
B.S. in Applied Mathematics, Kazakh State University, Almaty, Kazakhstan (1997)
Ph.D. in Genetics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA (2004)
Postdoctoral Training in Microbial Evolution, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada (2005-2009)
Certificate in Computer Graphics, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, NS, Canada (2006-2007)
Taught Courses
Publications
Roman Kogay, Sonja Koppenhöfer, J Thomas Beatty, Jens H Kuhn, Andrew S Lang, Olga Zhaxybayeva (2022): "Formal recognition and classification of gene transfer agents as viriforms." Virus Evolution, 8: veac100.
Roman Kogay and Olga Zhaxybayeva (2022): "Selection for Translational Efficiency in Genes Associated with Alphaproteobacterial Gene Transfer Agents." mSystems, 7: e0089222.
Zhengshuang Hua, Matthew Ouellette, Andrea M. Makkay, R. Thane Papke, and Olga Zhaxybayeva (2021): "Nutrient supplementation experiments with saltern microbial communities implicate utilization of DNA as a source of phosphorus", ISME Journal, 15: 2843-2864
Emma S. Esterman, Yuri I. Wolf, Roman Kogay, Eugene V. Koonin, and Olga Zhaxybayeva (2021): "Evolution of DNA packaging in gene transfer agents", Virus Evolution, 7: veab015.
Roman Kogay, Yuri I Wolf, Eugene V Koonin, and Olga Zhaxybayeva (2020): "Selection for Reducing Energy Cost of Protein Production Drives the GC Content and Amino Acid Composition Bias in Gene Transfer Agents", mBio, 11:e01206-20.
Chase WR, Zhaxybayeva O, Rocha J, Cosgrove DJ, Shapiro LR. (2020) "Global cellulose biomass, horizontal gene transfers and domain fusions drive microbial expansin evolution." New Phytol., 226:921-938.
Kogay R, Neely TB, Birnbaum DP, Hankel CR, Shakya M, Zhaxybayeva O. (2019): "Machine-learning classification suggests that many alphaproteobacterial prophages may instead be gene transfer agents", Genome Biol Evol., evz206.
Bauer KM, Dicovitsky R, Pellegrini M, Zhaxybayeva O, Ragusa MJ. (2019): "The structure of a highly-conserved picocyanobacterial protein reveals a Tudor domain with an RNA-binding function", J Biol Chem., 294:14333-14344.
Stephen M. J. Pollo, Abigail A. Adebusuy, Timothy J. Straub, Julia M. Foght, Olga Zhaxybayeva, Camilla L. Nesbo (2017) "Genomic insights and temperature-dependent transcriptional responses of Kosmotoga olearia, a deep-biosphere bacterium that can grow from 20C to 79C", Extremophiles, 21:963-979.
Complete list of publications is available at https://labofoz.host.dartmouth.edu/2.0/publications-2/
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