Hagen Klobusnik

About Me

Hello! I am a 1st year PhD student interested in the assembly dynamics of microbial communities in the context of climate change. My past research projects include deep sea symbiosis, harmful algal blooms, commercial algae harvesting, and sediment viral ecology. For my PhD I plan to explore microbial (algae) systems empirically and theoretically utilizing both mathematical modeling and experiments.

Outside of research i'm a big fan of sci-fi and horror media, normative ethics, baking, hiking under tall trees, and long bike rides.

Research

For a more in depth look at my work and past history see my CV

Algal Polyculturing

Commercial algae harvesting is a growing industry with potential for large scale sustainable food and energy production. One issue plaguing the industry is harvest loss due to invading algal grazers to large open pond systems (10-30% annually = tens of millions of dollars lost). Algal polycultures have the ability to increase the stability of harvests which has the potential to outweigh the loss of harvest quantity seen at scale from commercial farm crashes. I investigated commercially relevant algae taxa that show transgressive overyielding in bicultures and tested growth in higher diversity assemblages, followed by invasion assays to test how the different richness levels perform in response to invaders. I am currently preparing a manuscript for submission on this project.

CyanoHABs

I am a part of a large-scale study of harmful algae blooms in aquatic systems across a several hundred mile precipitation gradient. Our team has undergone many three-week-long field expeditions in order to understand the connection between nutrient loading, seasonal variation, and bacterial influence on harmful algal bloom events. We have chemically and bioinformatically analyzed water and sediment samples to connect toxin production, microbial community composition, and anthropogenic nutrient loading regimes. We have published the findings following the first year's sampling (2020) (Kieley et al. 2023, Stroski et al. 2024) and data from subsequent years are currently being used in manuscript preparations.

Metabolic Plasticity

The 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill has had lasting effects on marine ecosystems, and in recent years a species of oil-tolerant algae -Dunaliella tertiolecta- utilized phenotypic plasticity to thrive in the waters of the Gulf following the spill. I worked on a project under Dr. Quigg and Dr. Kamalanathan at Texas A&M University exposing cultures in various water associated fractions (WAFs) of oil to light and dark treatments to test photosynthetic electron transport (PET), pentose-phosphate pathway, mitochondrial electron transport, cyclic electron transport photorespiration and Kreb's cycle inhibition. Our results show how the phenotypic plasticity of multiple core metabolic pathways, together with cellular pigment and macromolecular changes, can account for oxidative stress tolerance in D. tertiolecta. I then assisted in writing and editing the manuscript for submission to the Journal of Phycology (Kamalanathan et al. 2022).

Deep Sea Symbiosis

During the summer of 2021 I was accepted into the University of Rhode Island GSO REU program working with Dr. Roxanne Beinart. I was the first to study the symbiote of the hydrothermal vent snail Alviniconcha adamantis, and assembling this genome has finally allowed comprehensive studies of the symbionts across geography, depth, host ecology, and has contributed to the Aquatic Symbiosis Genomes Project. I extracted DNA from snail gill tissues, manually binned the bacterial metagenomes, assembled a high-quality genome, and analyzed its relationship to other deep sea chemoautotrophic symbiotes. I presented my work twice over the summer as talks and collaboratively produced and published a genome report in G3 Genes (Breusing et al. 2022).

Sinkhole Metagenomics

Working closely with Dr. Jessica Labonté starting in 2020 I studied the microbial community of an underwater sinkhole sediment core. By comparing genetic pathways across nutrient environments and building metagenome-assembled genomes I discovered that organic matter source (terrestrial/aquatic derived) and nitrogen concentration correlated with metabolic pathway completion and dominant taxa. This is important as past studies of anchialine sediment microbiomes have primarily been 16S based, and establishing relative abundances of metabolic pathways allows for better understanding of these understudied systems. I presented my results both as a talk and as a poster at the Texas Conference of the American Society for Microbiology. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on this work and am currently preparing a manuscript.

Publications

A full updated list of my work can be found on google scholar HERE

In Prep

Klobusnik, N. H.& Roelke, D. L. (2025). Assessing the relationship between commercially relevant algal polyculture diversity, grazer resilience, and yield consistency. TBD

Kieley, C. M., Roelke, D. L., Pal S., Klobusnik, N. H., Walker, J. R., Cagle S. E., Labonté, J. M. (2024). Shallow stream loading of microcystins into downstream reservoirs in the southcentral united States. TBD

Roelke, D. L., Kieley, C. M., Pal S., Klobusnik, N. H., Walker, J. R., Cagle S. E., Labonté, J. M. (2024). Cyanotoxins as "stoppers" in the nitrogen cycle when inflows are low: Implications for climate change. TBD

2024

Stroski, K. M., Roelke, D. L., Kieley, C. M., Park, R., Campbell, K. L., Klobusnik, N. H., ... & Brooks, B. W. (2024). What, How, When, and Where: Spatiotemporal Water Quality Hazards of Cyanotoxins in Subtropical Eutrophic Reservoirs. Environmental Science & Technology, 58(3), 1473-1483.https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.3c06798

2023

Kieley, C. M., Roelke, D. L., Park, R., Campbell, K. L., Klobusnik, N. H., Walker, J. R., ... & Labonté, J. M. (2023). Concentration of total microcystins associates with nitrate and nitrite, and may disrupt the nitrogen cycle, in warm-monomictic lakes of the southcentral United States. Harmful Algae, 130, 102542.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hal.2023.102542

2022

Klobusnik, N. H., Walker, J. R., Labonté, J. M. (2022). The Hidden Microbial Community Structure and Metabolic Potential within Blackwoods Sinkhole, Bahamas. Undergraduate Honors Research Thesis, Texas A&M

Kamalanathan, M., Mapes, S., Prouse, A., Faulkner, P., Klobusnik, N. H., Hillhouse, J., ... & Quigg, A. (2022). Core metabolism plasticity in phytoplankton: Response of Dunaliella tertiolecta to oil exposure. Journal of Phycology, 58(6), 804-814.https://doi.org/10.1111/jpy.13286

Breusing, C., Klobusnik, N. H., Hauer, M. A., & Beinart, R. A. (2022). Genome assembly of the chemosynthetic endosymbiont of the hydrothermal vent snail Alviniconcha adamantis from the Mariana Arc. G3, 12(10), jkac220.https://doi.org/10.1093/g3journal/jkac220

Outreach

Letters to a Pre-Scientist (LPS)

I am currently participating in letters to a pre-scientist which "connects students to STEM professionals through snail mail to broaden students’ awareness of what STEM professionals look like and do at work and inspire all students to explore a future in STEM". If you have the want to inspire and inform some very very early career folks, I encourage you to check out LPS.

Elementary Student Activities

I design and lead activities with the students at Natchaug Elementary School in Willimantic CT. Instructions and presentations I have developed for the different groups of elementary students can be found HERE.

Queer Science Org (insert more info)

Seminars at the Community Center

Contact

Please reach out to me anytime, i'm a huge fan of meeting new folks and conversing about new research ideas. You can find me via the emails listed below (best way to contact me!)

hagen.klobusnik@uconn.edu

klobusnikh@gmail.com

• Scholar
• GitHub

Extra Stuff

Recipes

Some cheap, easy, vegan meals ive adapted through the years Here

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';