Postdoc at IceLab, Umeå University, in André Mateus’ group. I study tether proteins linking the outer membrane to peptidoglycan in bacteria and their role in maintaining cell stability.
I am part of the IceLab integrated multidisciplinary postdoctoral program working with André Mateus, Felipe Cava, and Ludvig Lizana. I completed my Master’s degree in Biomedical Science at the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Center for Biomedical Research, Delhi University, and later earned my PhD in Life Science from the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, which is affiliated with Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
During my PhD, I focused on identifying newly synthesized secretory proteins of the bacterial pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii, a growing global healthcare concern due to its antibiotic resistance. I developed an innovative proteomics method by genetically engineering A. baumannii with a specific tRNA synthetase. This allowed for the incorporation of a unique amino acid into newly synthesized proteins. This special amino acid can undergo bio-orthogonal non-canonical amino acid tagging (BONCAT), which facilitated the specific enrichment of peptides containing it. This method enabled us to identify newly synthesized secreted proteins during cell infections, allowing us to discover, for the first time, the proteins secreted by the bacteria in response to the host, even though they are usually present in low abundance compared to host cell proteins.
Currently, my work involves identifying the proteins that tether the outer membrane to the peptidoglycan across the bacterial kingdom and understanding their significance for cell stability. I will utilize an approach that combines high-throughput proteomics (Mateus lab), functional genomics (Cava lab), and mathematical modeling (Lizana lab).