Tanmay Bharat

Our laboratory uses electron cryo-tomography (cryo-ET) to study prokaryotic cell surfaces at the atomic level. We develop novel correlative imaging and image processing techniques to support our inquiries. Surface molecules mediate cellular interactions with the environment and play important roles in key processes including cell adhesion, biofilm formation and antibiotic tolerance in pathogenic bacteria.

A major focus of our work is to understand mechanistically how multicellular communities of microbes are formed. Multicellularity arises due to cellular interactions formed by surface molecules. We study how such surface molecules allow transition of microbes from a unicellular to a multicellular state. While structural biology of many cell surface molecules reveals fundamental information about bacterial and archaeal multicellularity, our work has clear biomedical relevance. For example surface molecules allow pathogenic bacteria such as P. aeruginosa to evade antibiotics with biofilm formation. Indeed, we have targeted the fundamental molecular mechanisms revealed in our work to disrupt multicellular microbial biofilms.