From the shallow sea to the lab bench
Schubert and fellow corresponding author Braden Tierney, Ph.D. first met as bench neighbors in the lab of Wyss Core Faculty member George Church, Ph.D. nine years ago, but didn’t start collaborating until both were later working at Harvard Medical School (HMS) in 2016. Schubert, a microbiologist who was interested in building tools for directed evolution of bacteria and their genomes, submitted a proposal to the HMS Consortium for Space Genetics’ 2019 Symposium on Climate Change to bring this work to cyanobacteria. He won the top prize, which funded his early forays into applying his tools to cyanobacteria to investigate their potential to help fix and sequester carbon.