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Paul Dunlap
Associate Professor
Ph.D., Biology, University of California at Los Angeles, 1984
U-M affiliation(s)
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Contact information
University of Michigan
1015 Kraus Natural Science Bldg.
830 N. University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1048
Phone: (734) 615-9099
Fax: (734) 763-0544
Email: pvdunlap@umich.edu
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Fields of study
Microbial phylogeny, symbiosis, bioluminescence & quorum sensing
Academic background
My bachelor of science degree is in general microbiology from Oregon State University, where I worked with the marine microbiologist R.Y. Morita (now retired). I received a Ph.D. in biology in 1984 from the University of California at Los Angeles with J.G. Morin (now at Cornell) and then did post-doctoral research in microbiology at Cornell University with E.P. Greenberg (now at University of Washington). I have held faculty appointments at New Mexico State University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute prior to coming to the University of Michigan.
Graduate student
Tory Hendry, Mincheol Kim
News
Microbiology textbook published
Professor Paul Dunlap and colleagues at Southern Illinois University have just published the newly revised 12th edition of the best selling majors microbiology textbook, "Brock Biology of Microorganisms" (Pearson Benjamin Cummings).
As an undergraduate student, Dunlap used the first edition of this text in his first microbiology course, and he uses the current edition of the book, traditionally viewed as the most scholarly of available texts in microbiology, as the required text in his microbiology courses here at U-M. Translated into several foreign languages and considered the authority in microbiology, the book serves the large undergraduate and graduate microbiology audience at universities and colleges across the U.S. and abroad.
Testing coevolution in bioluminescent symbiosis
Professor Paul Dunlap and post-doctoral fellow Jennifer Ast, together with Japanese colleagues, have demonstrated that luminous marine bacteria have not cospeciated with the animals that harbor them in bioluminescent, light-organ symbioses. Their findings, based on an extensive sampling of deep- and shallow-water fishes from east and southeast Asia, contradict the long-held view that bioluminescent symbioses are highly specific, exclusive associations reflecting genetic selection and symbiont-host coevolutionary interactions.
Instead, their work reveals that bioluminescent symbioses are less species specific than previously thought and that in many cases the associations are non-exclusive, with individual host fish harboring two species of luminous bacteria. Furthermore, detailed phylogenetic analyses of these associations demonstrate that the bacteria have not diverged evolutionarily in concert with their host fishes. The implication of their work is that patterns of bioluminescent symbiont-host affiliation observed in nature are likely to arise from a congruence in the environmental distributions of the individual species of bacteria and the animals with which they are symbiotic, not from species-specific genetic selection and coevolution.
Their paper, "Phylogenetic analysis of host-symbiont specificity and codivergence in bioluminescent symbioses" was recently published in the October 2007 journal Cladistics.
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