Dr Zahra Khomarbaghi

About

I am a microbial evolutionary biologist working on metal-buffering systems in bacteria. As part of the ELEMENTAL Hub WP4 project, my current research focuses on quantifying buffered metal availability in E. coli using gene expression-based proxies. I combine wet lab techniques (such as qPCR and metal stress assays) with analytical modelling (theta D calculation and MATLAB-based inference) to estimate intracellular metal availability across mutant and wild-type strains under different metal exposures.

I earned my PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, where I studied the evolution and genomic organisation of tRNA genes in Pseudomonas fluorescens. My broader research interests span microbial ecology, gene regulation, tRNA biology, synthetic biology, and bacterial stress responses. My postdoctoral work at the University of Manchester focused on genotype-to-phenotype mapping in antibiotic resistance evolution, combining molecular biology, synthetic biology, and computational analyses.

In 2024, I was awarded a position through the Physics of Life PDRA call (UKRI, 2023) to investigate how tRNA dynamics and the thermodynamics of codon–anticodon pairing influence translational efficiency.

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