We replaced a (literally) century-old laborious assay to measure the attachment of viruses to bacteria. We developed a fast and efficient microscopy-approach to measure attachment of individual viruses to bacterial cells.
Bacteria are great at evolving resistance to anything that we throw at them. This has caused antibiotic resistance crisis. We discuss smart approaches to use phages, viruses infecting bacteria, as therapeutics.
χ-phage can only infect *E. coli* with functional rotating flagella- so cool!! I am studying what happens when bacteria are forced to evolve against this phage. This work is unpublished but linked here is an article featuring a conference presentation.
The flagellar motor in E. coli can sense mechanical forces. We discovered a mechanism involved in this sensing. See Tweetorial for a quick explanation.
H. pylori is a bacterium implicated in ulcers and cancers of the stomach. We studied their behavior in response to chemical gradients and the biophysical principles involved in their navigation.
Our 2021 article revealed that H. pylori flagellar motors employ a switching strategy similar to E. coli. Due to different placement of flagella, this strategy should not allow H. pylori to chemotax effectively.
Flagella are involved in the earliest stages of surface colonization by bacteria. We review the current understanding and challenges in Section 1 of an invited topical review.
The orthogonal cross‐sectional profiles (side-views) of fluorescent objects can be distorted when reconstructed from confocal image-slices (aka z-stacks). We designed a chamber to mount samples vertically: parallel to the optical axis, perpendicular to the imaging plane.
Intuition suggests that the stiff cell nucleus should be rupture-prone when forced to pass through obstacles. Instead, it behaves like an oil drop during migration, passing smoothly.
Bacterial cells in urinary tract infections perform collective motion on top of the host-substrate. We studied the motors that provide the thrust during this motion.