Welcome to the Tfaily Lab at the University of Arizona

Department of Environmental Science

My lab investigates how the genetic and metabolic features of living organisms (e.g., human, microbial communities, and plants) and their biotic and abiotic interactions with the environment, give rise to ecosystem outputs and/or influence human health and diseases. I perform interdisciplinary research in systems biology, and functional -omics (metabolomics) to understand complex biological systems at the molecular level. The metabolism and its products tell our (or any ecosystem’s) biological life story, starting from the genes all the way to our changing environment and lifestyle. Through the measurement of metabolites, we can profile a person’s, organism’s or any ecosystem’s metabolic make-up at any given moment, which when coupled with multi-omics (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics) can further advance our understanding of the impact of external influences on our health and/or ecosystem stability, with exciting implications for our understanding of disease and personalized diagnosis and therapy on one hand and the future of our Earth in the face of changing environmental conditions.

The Tfaily lab focuses on:

1. Understanding microbiome-host interactions on a functional level and how such interactions are impacted by environmental disturbance or stress.
2. Investigating microbial drivers of soil-biosphere-atmosphere trace gas exchange.
3. Characterizing the metabolic pathways used by plants to thrive under stress.
4. Elucidating the risks of chemical exposures and/or the impact of our lifestyle on our well-being and health.
5. Revealing how bacteriophage therapy can be used as an anti-microbial alternative to treat patients with serious bacterial infections.
6. Developing new integrated multi-omics methodologies to highlight the interrelationships of the involved biomolecules, and their functions, and enable the understanding of the complex biology systematically and holistically