Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Professor of Biophysics
About
Overview
Our research is aimed at understanding the dynamic process that allows bacteria to integrate and adapt to their environment. The approach we’ve taken to this problem is to better understand the tools that microorganisms use to interact with themselves and their surroundings. This has led us to pursue extracellular organelle biology with special emphasis on curli fiber biogenesis by E. coli. During the course of our studies, we found that curli share distinguishing features with the medically important pathogenic amyloid fibers that are the hallmark of many neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, systemic amyloidosis and the prion diseases.
PROTEIN MISFOLDING DONE RIGHT
The discovery of a natural amyloid protein in E. coli opens up the possibility of performing genetic and biochemical experiments that are impractical or impossible in other amyloid model systems. Our work focuses on three related questions: how curli are assembled on the cell surface, how curli
modify community behavior in bacteria, and how curli expression affects the host-pathogen interaction during an infection. We blend microscopy, biochemistry, and genetics in a concerted effort to delineate the structural, functional, and molecular details of curli, a distinct class of bacterial fibers that share properties with amyloid proteins. The curli biogenesis apparatus is possibly the world’s most tractable model system for understanding amyloid formation. But more than that, teasing apart the details of curli biogenesis will give insights into such fundamental bacterial processes as gene regulation, protein secretion and protein folding.
