Cell Physiology and Communities
How cells allocate limited resources and regulate metabolism, and how these choices shape microbial communities.
Cells must divide limited resources among growth, maintenance, and responses to a changing environment. We combine multi-omics measurements, such as proteomics and metabolomics, with mechanistic yet data-constrained virtual cell models to capture these trade-offs quantitatively, from the regulation of single enzymes to whole-cell metabolism, and use them to understand how microbial communities assemble and how they can be designed.
Recent work includes:
- How cell state transitions drive transcriptome–proteome alignment in a minimal photoautotroph (bioRxiv, 2026).
- Multi-omics analysis of the temporal scales of carbon metabolism in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus under light disturbance (PRX Life, 2025).
- How thiol modifications modulate allosteric regulation of the OpcA–G6PDH complex through conformational gate control (Protein Science, 2026).
- Synergy and antagonism in a genome-scale model of metabolic hijacking by bacteriophages (Science Advances, 2026).
Applications: host–pathogen and phage–host metabolism in infectious disease.
TODO (Song): add current community projects, collaborators, and funding.
People
- Song Feng — Assistant Professor & Principal Investigator
- Zachary Johnson — Postdoctoral Associate