Rebecca Creamer
New Mexico State University, NM·Plant Science & Agriculture
Seeds of flowering plants often carry hidden partners: fungi and bacteria that live inside them and pass to the next generation. Some seed-borne fungi protect plants from parasites, pathogens and drought, shape the ecosystems around them, and one was even shown to donate a disease resistance gene to a wild relative of wheat.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
fungal endophytes
seed-borne fungi
plant-microbe symbiosis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Survey seed collections, including China's Germplasm Bank of Wild Species, for seed-borne fungal endophytes across flowering plants to map where these symbioses occur.
- Survey endophyte-bearing plants and neighboring plants across wide geographic ranges, comparing genetics, gene expression, morphology and ecological effects of hosts and fungi.
- Test in field experiments with K-12 schools how seed-borne fungal endophytes of grasses and legumes drive diversity of their hosts and the broader plant community.
More about the research
Yet how widespread these partnerships are, and how they affect plant diversity, is largely unknown.
Why it matters
Understanding how inherited fungal partners shape plant diversity could guide efforts to preserve biodiversity and keep natural ecosystems, rangelands and pastures healthy, resilient and productive, which matters to land managers and livestock producers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Thomas Miller
Rice University, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether Epichloë fungi are most beneficial to host grasses in stressful years, using 15–20 years of demographic data from a symbiont-removal experiment across seven grass species.
Liana Burghardt
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Identify which legume host traits support which rhizobial bacteria by analyzing plant characteristics and field samples from legumes, using traditional and AI-enabled image and statistical analysis.
Benjamin Blackman
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Plant Science & Agriculture
Characterize the cell types and gene expression patterns that arise as sunflower tissue attempts to regenerate, using tissue-level analyses and single-nucleus transcriptomics, which reads gene activity in individual cell nuclei.
The school
New Mexico State University: 2 labs on PI Pages, $143M a year on research, 90 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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