Last Friday, on the last day of November, 2018, Mike Henson successfully defended his dissertation, entitled High-Throughput Cultivation of Bacterioplankton from the Gulf of Mexico and Genomics of the First Cultured LD12 Representative. It was a sunny, beautiful morning and Mike had a great turnout. His dissertation contains three data chapters, two of which have already been published (Henson et al. mSphere 2016; Henson et al. ISME J 2018), and a third that is nearing submission. These chapters describe improvements we made to the dilution-based cultivation protocol pioneered by Don Button and colleagues and enhanced to a high-throughput format by Steve Giovannoni and many of his former students and post-docs (including yours truly). It also quantifies the relative efficacy of our cultivation work by strain, explores why cultivation effectiveness might differ across taxa, and highlights the added cultivar diversity contributed by Mike’s efforts over the years. The dissertation also includes an in-depth exploration of the genomics of the first cultivated LD12 representative, which Mike has previously posted about below. Mike also has another first-author publication on the microbiome of the Mississippi River (Henson et al. L&O 2018) that is not included in the dissertation. So in short, Mike has three first authored publications after 4.5 years of graduate school, and has two in the pipe, combined with many other co-authorships. Mike was also able to secure two different grants during his time here at LSU. He will be coming with the lab to USC for a one year postdoc to finish his projects and help get us rolling there. We’re very happy we don’t have to say goodbye to Mike yet!
