I’m a computational evolutionary biologist interested in the history of life and the processes of evolution. I mainly work on questions about the “tree of life”, evolution in deep time, and the evolution of (usually microbial) genomes, from the perspectives of phylogenetics, comparative genomics and bioinformatics. Some of the questions I work on include:

• The structure of the tree of life, and the phylogenetic position of eukaryotic cells - for example, are there two or three primary domains?
• The origin of eukaryotes, including our archaeal and bacterial ancestry, the stages of endosymbiotic integration, and the subsequent evolution of eukaryotic lineages.
• The nature (metabolism, physiology, cell biology) of early life forms, including LUCA (the common ancestor of all life), the early members of the archaeal and bacterial domains, and the diversity of single-celled eukaryotes.
• The course of metabolic evolution - what are the oldest metabolic pathways, and how have life and the “Earth system” co-evolved through time?
• Co-evolutionary relationships among microbes and between microbes and their hosts, including symbiosis and endosymbiosis.
• Phylogenetics and bioinformatics methods development, for making sense of today’s large-scale biological (e.g. omics) datasets.

Lab website here: https://tancata.github.io

Current group members

• Dr. Giorgio Bianchini (evolution of symbiotic integration, the origin of eukaryotes)
• Dr. Zoe Vance (whole genome duplication - with James Clark and the WGDip consortium)
• Chenxue Lin (early eukaryote evolution)
• Lijia Jiang (evolution of archaeal metabolisms)

Get in touch if you are interested in joining - currently hiring for PDRA and PhD positions at Bath.