At the applied level, high-throughput screening tools have been developed for discovering active compounds that can impair bacterial quorum sensing and c-di-GMP signaling. In addition, quorum sensing and c-di-GMP signaling are also being manipulated for improving the performance of industrial related bioreactors such as the microbial fuel cells.
At the translational level, clinical isolates of major nosocomial infection causing species are monitored for their antibiotic resistance and genome contents. Comparative genomics and experimental evolution experiments are further employed to identify adaptive evolution of pathogens during chronic biofilm-associated infections.
Research Focus
At the fundamental level, both environmental stress and host immune-derived stress are examined for their impacts on inducing bacterial intercellular (quorum sensing) and intracellular (c-di-GMP) signaling mechanisms that coordinate biofilm formation and stress resistance. The combination of molecular biology and systems biology tools (transcriptomics and proteomics) has enabled us to examine how quorum sensing and c-di-GMP signaling mediate stress response in mono-species and multiple-species biofilms.
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