The Thrash lab at the University of Southern California investigates the relationships among and between aquatic microorganisms and their environment. We combine high throughput culturing, physiology, microbial genomics, and metabolomics with cultivation independent methods (e.g., meta-omics and single-cell genomics). We seek to understand why microorganisms occur where they do and what they are doing there. We are part of the Marine and Environmental Biology Section of the Department of Biological Sciences in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. - environmental microbiology, cultivation, bacterioplankton, microbial physiology, genomics