CAREER: Mechanical control of cellular physiology in bacteria

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This integrative project trains students and postdoctoral scholars to perform research at the forefront of an emerging interdisciplinary field of microbiology, which seeks to describe how bacteria use large mechanical forces to control important cellular processes such as cell growth and communication between cells. This effort stands to revolutionize our understanding of bacteria, a keystone of biological research and whose many capabilities underlie agricultural and industrial productivity. Additionally, this project integrates fundamental microbiological research into the curriculum for a new “Inside-Out” microbiology course offered jointly to undergraduate students and New York City prison inmates, which will break down stereotypes between these groups and contribute to their career trajectories.The central hypothesis that this research will test is that bacteria precisely tune mechanical forces in their cell envelope in order to actively control subcellular physiology, using release of envelope-derived vesicles and cell surface expansion as the two major processes to explore this mechanism. State-of-the-art microfluidic technology will be combined with novel microscopy methods, and molecular microbiological techniques will be used to precisely alter the mechanical properties and forces within the bacterial envelope while measuring the dynamics of these processes at the single-cell level. Sophisticated biophysical modeling techniques will be employed to interpret data and guide experiments. The results of these experiments will be directly integrated into the novel “Inside-Out” course.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.