UW-Madison Dept of Bacteriology

Research Focus

With the advent of antibiotics in the 1940's, many of the threats and fears of bacterial disease were temporarily overcome. Today antibiotic resistance and newly emerging microbial diseases are among the greatest threats to human health. At the same time, it is now abundantly clear that the vast majority of our interactions with microbes are beneficial. We study the structural aspects of microbial interactions, using x-ray crystallography and complementary techniques. Our focus is the structure and assembly of Type IV pili, surface organelles that mediate attachment of bacteria to one another, to abiotic surfaces, and to eukaryotic cells. Pili are also required for twitching motility, which allows them to form biofilms and to slither over and colonize eukaryotic host cells. Our crystal structures of the pilus retraction protein PilT, a conserved nucleotide-binding protein essential for twitching motility, reveal large domain motions and asymmetries that drive motility. Our work on the underlying mechanism of assembly and disassembly of Type IV pili has applications in medicine, agriculture, and nanotechnology.

As a structural biology lab in a microbiology building surrounded by world class research departments, we are well-poised for many fruitful and exciting collaborations. We are currently involved in a dozen interdisciplinary research projects with faculty members in Bacteriology, Medical Microbiology, Genetics, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Entomology, and Chemical and Biological Engineering here at UW as well as several international collaborations.