Dr. Sabree studies host-microbe interactions, with a focus on the ways in which these interactions can benefit the host. He uses insects as a model.

Dr. Sabree earned his undergraduate degree from Howard University and his Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He held two postdoctoral fellowships, first at the University of Arizona and then at Yale. He joined the faculty at The Ohio State University in 2012. In 2015, he received a $50,000 grant from the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.

Symbiotic (mutually beneficial) relationships have been observed between many species and the bacteria that live within them. These relationships often show evidence of long-term co-evolution, which suggests millions of years of symbiosis and has drastic impacts on the genomes of the bacteria. In stink bugs, a clade (evolutionary group) of global agricultural pests, it has been demonstrated that bacteria that live in the gut are transmitted from mother to offspring. When this process has been disrupted, the offspring take longer to develop, behave strangely, and have reduced fertility. These bacteria are also hypothesized to help the stink bugs survive by producing essential nutrients that are not present in bugs’ diet.

In a recent paper, Dr. Sabree and colleagues analyzed the genomes of symbiotic bacteria living in four related species of stink bug. They found that the genomes of the symbiotic bacteria were very similar to each other, and that all had lost large portions of their genomes compared to related species that don’t live inside stink bugs. When they analyzed which genes were lost vs. which were kept, they found that the bacteria tended to have lost genes that were redundant to genes in the host and retained genes that performed functions that the stink bug’s genome did not.

These results are interesting because we don’t know very much about the diversity of bacteria-host symbiotic relationships that exist in nature - there are only a few examples that have been studied a lot. Here, Dr. Sabree and his team found that some of the features we associate with these symbiotic relationships (lost of redundant genes, retention of non-redundant genes) can occur even when the bacteria don’t live inside of host cells.