The Bacillus thuringiensis δ-endotoxins (Bt toxins) are widely used insecticidal proteins in engineered crops that provide agricultural, economic, and environmental benefits, constituting a substantial and increasingly ...

Complex interactions between mammalian hosts and their gut microbes have evolved over many millennia and have established a sophisticated communication system that is essential for symbiosis and mutualism. Perturbations ...

Staphylococcus aureus is a gram positive coccoid pathogen that causes intractable infections in hospitals and communities around the world, and tens of thousands of people die of these infections every year. In order to ...

Bacterial biofilm formation, the construction of dense, protective, multicellular communities, is a widely conserved behavior. In some bacteria, such as the Gram-positive model organism Bacillus subtilis, the genetics ...

In this thesis I investigate how the individual components of biological systems interact, and how the form of these interactions determines overall system behavior. The interactions I study occur at widely different scales: ...

Animals associate with microbes in complex interactions with profound fitness consequences. These interactions play an enormous role in the evolution of both partners, and recent advances in sequencing technology have ...

The emergence and transmission of drug resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) calls for urgency in understanding the barriers to effective treatment. Here we developed a chemostat cultivation system to ...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes one of the most pernicious infectious diseases of humankind – tuberculosis, which is still a global problem in the 21st century. Drug-resistant M. tuberculosis infections are on the rise, ...

The goal of synthetic biology is to engineer biological systems in order to solve industrial and medical challenges, as well as to learn about these systems by building. Cyanobacteria, a chassis for such engineering, are ...

The HIV epidemic persists in many parts of the world, with the majority of new infections occurring through the female genital tract (FGT). The permissiveness of the genital mucosa to HIV is modulated by the integrity of ...