Jose V. Lopez is an American-Filipino molecular biologist. He has been faculty and professor of biology at Nova Southeastern University. in Dania Beach FL since 2007. His doctoral dissertation involved the characterization of transpositions of mitochondrial DNA into the nuclei of cats and the naming of NUMT as a common evolutionary genomics phenomenon. Subsequent work has involved the application of molecular genetics to symbiosis and marine biology research. Lopez is also known for co-founding the Global Invertebrate Genomics Alliance community of scientists, participating in the Porifera Tree of Life and Earth Microbiome Projects and raising the awareness of microbiological concepts for potential extraterrestrial mesocosm simulation, modeling, and colonization.
Career
Lopez obtained his bachelor's degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He then earned a Master of Science degree focused on molecular biology at the Florida State University, and his doctorate in Environmental Biology and Public Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax VA studying the evolution of mitochondrial DNA and its transpositions into cellular nuclei in feline nuclear genomes in the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Genomics Diversity under Stephen J. O’Brien in Frederick MD. Dr. Lopez then applied his molecular evolutionary training in postdoctoral appointments with Dr. Nancy Knowlton characterizing the Orbicellaannularis coral sibling species complex at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and marine sponge genetics with Dr. Shirley Pomponi at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Ft Pierce, FL. The latter allowed him to use Johnson Sea-Link submersible technology to investigate deep sea sponges and corals. Lopez's research on marine sponges has been featured in a South Florida PBS documentary "Sponges: are they the oldest animal in the sea?" on ChangingSeas TV. While at NSU's Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography, his laboratory has applied genomics tools to address various specific questions in marine invertebrate-microbial symbiosis, microbiome ecology, genomics, forensics, metagenomics of oil-exposed organisms, conservation genomics and systematics/phylogenetics. Professor Lopez is part of the Deep Pelagic Nekton Dynamics Consortium of the Gulf of Mexico to better understand food webs and pelagic microbial distributions in the deep Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Lopez has served as an associate editor for the Journal of Heredity since 2008. In 2018, he was awarded an NSU President's Distinguished Professor Award. Two major themes that appear consistently throughout Lopez's research are symbiosis and biological diversity at multiple levels.
The Global Invertebrate Genomics Alliance (GIGA)
Professor Lopez has a proclivity to collaborate and so the forming of GIGA provided a natural progression. The mission of GIGA is to promote research and student training into the genomics of marine and aquatic invertebrate animals. After some initial consultations with geneticist Stephen J. O'Brien, and seeing the success of the first whole genome sequencing project, Genomes10K, Lopez moved to form GIGA in 2013. This involved reaching out to a large and diverse community of invertebrate biologists, who mostly supported the concept. Then support to fund a maiden workshop was provided by the American Genetics Association. GIGA focuses mostly on aquatic animals, but has similar problems to the larger invertebrate consortium, Insect5K. Both GIGA and i5K now help comprise a "network of networks" as part of the Earth BioGenome Project launched in December 2018 to try and sequence the whole genomes of 1.5 million eukaryotes, the bulk of multicellular biodiversity on the earth. GIGA has now elected a new slate of officers in order to register as a not-for-profit entity in 2020. Lopez will serve as GIGA's first president.
Sponges, Microbial Symbionts and Microbial Communities
Studying marine sponges indirectly led to marine microbes, since Lopez had no formal training in microbiology. Sponge biology was fascinating from various scientific perspectives: microbes are the oldest living organisms while sponges represent one of the oldest groups on the metazoan evolutionary tree; sponges host diverse microbial symbionts which could the original source of the many natural products isolated from the phylum. The latter aspect sparked an interest in natural microbial communities which has expanded to several other ecosystems and host models in later years. Besides the well-known symbiosis, Lopez initially hypothesized that sponge microbiomes could serve as indicators for the communities in their immediate seawater environment, since sponges are filter feeders. This hypothesis was later proven only partially correct, as growing evidence indicated that many sponge species carry their own adapted symbionts. Nonetheless, Lopez applied the burgeoning culture-independent molecular tools that arose from the Woese revolution of rRNA-based bacterial systematics. Eventually molecular based identifications expanded to local marine ecosystems as predictors of water quality, human skin microbiomes as possible forensic tools, Myotis bat feces to test for potential microbiome effects on longevity, and the Lake Okeechobee watershed of Florida.
Life
Lopez's parents are University of Philippines graduates, clinical pathologist Ernesto G. and Rosario Lopez, who first met each other in Binghamton New York. He is married to Amy Doyle of Plantation FL.
