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Introduction
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My transition from a successful career in science to one in medicine can be viewed more as a culmination of ideas rather than two separate careers. My interest in unlocking nature’s secrets of how microbes interact with the environment began when I discovered that bacteria were capable of sensing the redox potential of minerals, relocating onto the surface of minerals, and respire minerals in the absence of oxygen. For the past several years, I have come to understand how ingenious microbes adapt to survive in extreme environments, including conditions inside our own body.
Publications
Publications (11)
This disclosure provides microbes engineered to detect virulent and spore states of pathogens and release an appropriate therapeutic response accordingly and compositions and methods of use of the same .
A novel bacterial behavior called congregation was recently described inShewanella oneidensisMR-1 as the accumulation of cells around insoluble electron acceptors (IEA). It is the result of a series of "run-and-reversal" events enabled by modulation of swimming speed and direction. The model proposed that the swimming cells constantly sense their s...
Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 cells utilize a behaviour response called electrokinesis to increase their speed in the vicinity of IEAs (insoluble electron acceptors), including manganese oxides, iron oxides and poised electrodes [Harris, El-Naggar, Bretschger, Ward, Romine, Obraztsova and Nealson (2010) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 326-331]. How...
Catabolite repression is a significant impediment to industrial scale generation of biofuels using microbial metabolism of plant biomass. In order to overcome this limitation, we aim to generate a bacterial co-culture composed of a number of engineered organisms that have the capability to consume only select sugars. The base organism for our effor...
We have successfully performed bacterial reduction of an iron-containing outcrop sand sample under static conditions using Shewanella genus bacteria. Adsorption of an anionic (alkyl benzyl sulfonate) surfactant was around 7-times lower on treated outcrop samples. Most of this reduction (~3X) occurs over the first 3-4 days of incubation, contemporan...
Surfactant adsorption is not just a primary economic impediment to chemical enhanced oil recovery (EOR), it has also been identified as a leading uncertainty in economic forecasting (Anderson et al., 2006). This is somewhat surprising, as the basic phenomena controlling the adsorption of anionic surfactants – at least on the majority minerals prese...
We report a previously undescribed bacterial behavior termed electrokinesis. This behavior was initially observed as a dramatic increase in cell swimming speed during reduction of solid MnO(2) particles by the dissimilatory metal-reducing bacterium Shewanella oneidensis MR-1. The same behavioral response was observed when cells were exposed to smal...
