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Advanced Science News has featured research from C-MĀIKI faculty member Masato Yoshizawa! Masato has been studying the effect that a ketogenic diet has on cavefish that display autism-like behaviors. Read more about his research in the article from ASN. https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/cavefish-provide-clues-to-the-keto-diets-effect-on-autism-like-behavior/

Sean Swift, former C-MĀIKI lab technician and current PhD candidate in Dr. Craig Nelson's lab recently presented new results from Waimea at the Spring 2024 M4 Seminar! Check out the recording of his talk here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yj4JnRGXHnMsHwX1cmEvNL6277AKykJm/view?ts=66061527

Congratulations to C-MĀIKI faculty members Kiana Frank and Mahdi Belcaid on their tenure and promotion! See more here: https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2024/06/13/uh-2024-tenure-and-promotion-list/

The research of C-MĀIKI Director, Nicole Hynson, has been featured in the Smithsonian magazine! This article highlights the efforts of the Hynson lab in utilizing mycorrhizal fungi in na'u (Gardenia brighamii) restoration. Can Fungi Save This Endangered Hawaiian Tree?

Sending a big congratulations to C-MĀIKI faculty member Joanne Yew for her promotion to Full Researcher! https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2025/06/10/uh-2025-tenure-and-promotion-list/

C-MĀIKI faculty member Alex Culley has been featured in a Science article for the discovery of a novel dinoflagellate giant virus (PelV-1). This virus has the longest virus appendage described to date! Read the article here: https://www.science.org/content/article/giant-virus-record-long-tail-discovered-pacific-ocean Read the bioRxiv preprint here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.19.665647v1.full

The #mahimicrobe competition is back! Awards of up to $10,000 will support innovative, microbiome-focused projects that address pressing Hawaiʻi-based problems through research, science communication, and transdisciplinary collaboration. This competition is open to all UH Mānoa graduate students (MS/PhD) and postdoctoral trainees. Visit the #mahimicrobe2025 page for more information. https://www.c-maiki.org/mahimicrobe2025

C-MĀIKI faculty members Daisuke Takagi and Nhu Nguyen have been featured in the UH News for their study on bacterial dispersal and nutrient transport along fungal highways! They received a 3-year NIH/NSF grant to explore these microbial interactions, which combine mathematic modeling with biological research. https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2025/09/10/how-do-bacteria-travel-on-fungal-freeways/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=UH+News+091725 Video showing bacteria spreading along a larger fungal network

UH Foundation has featured the research of four C-MAIKI faculty in a recent article! Coral reef resilience on Maui - Craig Nelson Infectious disease control with sterile mosquitoes - Matthew Medeiros Biodiversity conservation with indigenous pomace flies - Joanne Yew and Nicole Hynson See Q&A responses and read more about their research in the UH Foundation feature: https://www.uhfoundation.org/impact/research/reefs-rainforests-and-resistance-c-maikis-microbial-mission

The species area relationship is a classic ecological law describing the relationship between habitat increase and the number of species. Species area relationships are resoundingly positive across macrobes such as plants and animals, and emerge through non-exclusive stochastic and deterministic processes including changes in immigration and extinction, drift, and environmental heterogeneity. Due to unique attributes of the microbial lifestyle, they may not abide by similar rules as macrobes, especially when it comes to spatial scaling. We predict that host-associated microbiomes will exhibit shallower species area relationships than free-living microbiomes due to strong host filtering, and that the species area relationships of bacteria will be shallower than fungi due primarily to differences in dispersal ability. We test these predictions in a relatively simple field system where bromeliad phytotelmata comprise aquatic ecosystems that support invertebrates and environmental substrates such as detritus. Larger phytotelmata generate larger habitat islands for microbiomes allowing us to explicitly examine their species area relationships. We find that the species area relationships of free-living and host-associated microbiomes differ, as do those of microbiome members. By assessing the relationship between environmental conditions and richness, and measuring diversity across scales, we posit that these observed differences in species area relationships are owed to differences in realized niches and dispersal abilities among microbes. These findings highlight that the classic laws of biological spatial scaling do not necessarily accurately represent microbiomes, and that the influence of area on diversity appears to be more important for some microbiomes and microbes than others. Click here to read more

Food webs govern interactions among organisms, and drive energy fluxes within ecosystems. With an increasing appreciation for the role of symbiotic microbes in host metabolism and development, it is imperative to understand the extent to which microbes conform to, and potentially influence, canonical food web efficiencies and structures. Here, we investigate whether bacteria and their taxa and functional genes are compositionally nested within a simple model food web hierarchy, and the extent to which this is predicted by the trophic position of the host. Using shotgun and amplicon sequencing of discrete food web compartments within replicate tank bromeliads, we find that both taxonomy and function are compositionally nested and largely mirror the pyramid-shaped distribution of food webs. Further, nearly the entirety of bacterial taxa and functional genes associated with hosts are contained within host-independent environmental samples. Community composition of bacterial taxa did not significantly correlate with that of functional genes, indicating a high likelihood of functional redundancy. Whereas bacterial taxa were shaped by both location and trophic position of their host, functional genes were not spatially structured. Our work illustrates the advantages of applying food web ecology to predict patterns of overlapping microbiome composition among unrelated hosts and distinct habitats. Because bacterial symbionts are critical components of host metabolic potential, this result raises important questions about whether bacterial consortia are shaped by the same energetic constraints as hosts, and whether they play an active role in food web efficiency. Click here to read more

C-MĀIKI Researcher Alex Culley has been featured in a Télé-Québec Documentary (Climat déréglé, santé en danger) exploring the threat of climate change on ecosystems and human health. Dr. Culley describes the possible threat of microbes that are being released due to thawing permafrost.