Marcus Mullen

Pythons are a unique non-model organism with a fascinating feeding strategy—they can go for months without eating at all. But when these snakes do finally eat, their meals can be exceptionally large (sometimes exceeding their own body weight). Resulting is a model of extreme metabolic plasticity, whereby pythons wildly alter their metabolic rate (increasing by up to 44-fold) throughout their feeding cycle. Marcus researches this postprandial metabolic response in pythons, and his interest lies at the intersection of the snake microbiome and its metabolic regulation. By studying the python as an extreme model of metabolic regulation, we hope to discover novel mechanisms of metabolic control that can inform therapeutic strategies to treat dysmetabolism in humans.