Tommy Harding, Post Doctoral Fellow

I was born in Quebec City, where I completed a Bachelor's degree in microbiology at Université Laval. During these three years I was involved in two research projects: one that studied the optical properties of thermokarst lakes, water bodies formed in thawing permafrost, in northern Quebec, and another that focused on the microbial diversity of Milne Fjord, located in the Canadian High Arctic. I began a Masters degree in 2008 under the supervision of Drs. Warwick F. Vincent and Connie Lovejoy at Université Laval. My Master thesis, entitled Aerial Dispersal and Spatial Distribution of Microbes in the Cryosphere, describes the microbial diversity detected by molecular and culture techniques in the snow and air of the northern coast of Ellesmere Island, Canada. I joined the Roger Lab in 2010 to begin my PhD study on the molecular adaptations of extreme halophiles. Co-supervised by Alastair Simpson, I work on Pharyngomonas kirbyi, a deep-branching Heterolobosea, and Halocafeteria seosinensis, a stramenopile. Analysis of their transcriptome will give us insights on how these obligate halophiles have adapted to extreme environments with respect to gene content and expression. Furthermore, we will determine whether lateral gene transfer has played a role in this story.

Publications:

• Tommy Harding, Roger, A.J. and Simpson, A.G.B. 2017. Adaptations to high salt in a halophilic protist: differential expression and gene acquisitions through duplications and gene transfers. Frontiers in Microbiology 8: 944.
• Yang, J., Tommy Harding, Kamikawa, R., Simpson, A.G.B. and Roger, A.J. 2017. Mitochondrial genome evolution and a novel RNA editing system in deep-branching heteroloboseids. Genome Biology and Evolution 9: 1161-1174.
• Tommy Harding, Matthew W. Brown, Alastair G.B. Simpson, Andrew J. Roger. 2016. Osmoadaptative strategy and its molecular signature in obligately halophilic heterotrophic protists . Genome Biology and Evolution. Epub ahead of print. doi: 10.1093/gbe/evw152
• Michelle M Leger, Markéta Petrů, Vojtech Zársky, Laura Eme, Cestmír Vlček, Tommy Harding, B Franz Lang, Marek Elias, Pavel Dolezal, and Andrew J Roger. 2015. An ancestral bacterial division system is widespread in eukaryotic mitochondria. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA Epub ahead of print. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1421392112
• Alonso Sáez, L., Zeder, M., Harding, T., Pernthaler, J., Lovejoy, C., Bertilsson, S. and Pedrós-Alió, C. (2014) Winter bloom of a rare betaproteobacterium in the Arctic Ocean. Frontiers in Microbiology, doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2014.00425.
• Harding, T., Brown, M.W., Plotnikov, A., Selianova, E., Park, J.S., Gunderson, J.H., Baumgartner, M., Silberman, J.D., Roger, A.J. and Simpson, A.G.B. (2013) Amoeba stages in the deepest branching heteroloboseans, including Pharyngomonas: Evolutionary and systematic implications. Protist 164: 272-286
• Comeau, A.M.,Harding, T., Galand, P.E., Vincent, W.F. and Lovejoy, C. (2012) Vertical distribution of microbial communities in a perennially-stratified Arctic lake with saline, anoxic bottom waters. Nature Scientific Reports 2, Article number: 604 doi:10.1038/srep00604
• Harding, T., Jungblut, A.D., Lovejoy, C. and Vincent, W.F. (2011) Microbes in High Arctic snow and implications for the cold biosphere, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 77:3234-3243.
• Veillette, J., Lovejoy, C., Potvin, M., Harding, T., Jungblut, A.D., Antoniades, D., Chénard, C., Suttle, C.A. and Vincent, W.F. (2011) Milne Fiord epishelf lake: a coastal Arctic ecosystem vulnerable to climate change. Ecoscience 18: 304-316.

You can reach Tommy at:

Work Phone: (+1) 902-494-2881
Fax: (+1) 902-494-1355
Email: tommy{dot}harding{at}dal{.ca}ca