Dr. Mostafa Elshahed

Anaerobic Microbiology Core Director, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics

The Anaerobic Core Director is Dr. Mostafa Elshahed, a professor with more than 25 years of experience handling strictly anaerobic organisms and a research program focused on anaerobic habitats using culture-dependent and culture-independent strategies. The Anaerobic Core employs a PhD-level Manager and a staff scientist. The Director and Manager consult with researchers, provide anaerobic culture expertise, and maintain equipment. Core services include 1) anaerobic culturomics to enable high throughput culture isolation under a wide range of growth conditions and oxygen concentrations, 2) targeted enrichment to isolate specific microbes based on phenotypic traits, 3) sequence-guided culture isolation using nanobody-tags to specific organisms followed by cell sorting and targeted cultivation, 4) culture storage and record keeping, and 5) downstream services including bioinformatics consultation, PCR-amplicon and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry-based identification, genome sequencing and automated annotation, metagenomic and meta-transcriptomic analysis, 16S rRNA gene-based microbial community analysis, and sequence submission to database repositories. These services are widely available to Oklahoma researchers and directly benefit OCMR research projects.