Tuberculosis (TB) remains the second leading cause of infectious disease mortality worldwide, killing over one million people annually. Rising antibiotic resistance has created an urgent need for host-directed therapeutics (HDTs) — preferably by …
After nearly a century of vaccination and six decades of drug therapy, tuberculosis (TB) kills more people annually than any other infectious disease. Substantial challenges to disease eradication remain among vulnerable and underserved populations. …
Discovering unique pathogenic sRNA in infected hosts
Accessory sigma factors, which reprogram RNA polymerase to transcribe specific gene sets, activate bacterial adaptive responses to noxious environments. Here we reconstruct the complete sigma factor regulatory network of the human pathogen …
Computational approaches to study host responses to infection and identify host-directed therapeutic interventions.
Summary We also studied host responses to M. tuberculosis infection using computational approaches:
characterizing the transcriptional response in infected macrophages under various small molecule perturbations using RNA-Seq analysis; understanding the dysregulation of lipid metabolism in M. tuberculosis-infected macrophages using dynamic Bayesian model and statistical analyses of heterogeneous single-cell populations.
The bacterial envelope integrates essential stress-sensing and adaptive functions; thus, envelope-preserving functions are important for survival. In Gram-negative bacteria, envelope integrity during stress is maintained by the multi-gene Psp …