Caitlin Singleton’s research interest is the microbial ecology of environmental systems, particularly the microorganisms involved in bioremediation, waste reduction, and biogeochemical cycling. She is currently a postdoc in Per Halkjær Nielsen’s lab at the Center for Microbial Communities at Aalborg University, Denmark. Caitlin obtained her Ph.D. in Microbiology in 2018, under the supervision of Prof. Gene Tyson and Dr. Ben Woodcroft at the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics, University of Queensland, Australia. During her Ph.D., she characterized methanotroph and nitrifier communities across a natural permafrost thaw gradient using metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, population genome recovery, and metabolic reconstruction. As part of the international IsoGenie team, she published on permafrost microbes in ISMEJ, Nature, and Nature Microbiology. Before starting her postdoc at Aalborg University, she worked for a few months on coral microbiomes and symbionts, using metagenomics, and contributed to research published in Nature Microbiology.
At the Center for Microbial Communities, Caitlin is part of an interdisciplinary team investigating the microbes involved in resource recovery and nutrient cycling in wastewater. Here, she applies her skills in metagenomics to the activated sludge system. She worked under the supervision of Per Halkjær Nielsen and Mads Albertsen to recover >1000 high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes using cutting-edge long-read sequencing (PromethION, Oxford Nanopore). This work was recently accepted in Nature Communications and sets a new standard in the field of genome-based metagenomics. Additionally, she has collaborated with other members of the Center, contributing to their research with the comparative genomics of novel populations. Caitlin is passionate about sustainability and the progression towards a circular economy. She was recently awarded a postdoctoral fellowship research grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, to apply her skills to anaerobic digestion and biogas production. In the REPARES project, Caitlin is involved in searching for antibiotic resistance genes in high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes, for linking to the MiDAS Field Guide.