Elizabeth Shank
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Microbiology & Immunology
In nature, bacteria seldom live alone. They live in mixed communities where neighbors constantly send each other chemical signals.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Biochemistry
Genetics
- Topics
Bacillus subtilis
bacterial cell-cell communication
interspecies interactions
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Describe which genes are active, which lineages cells come from, and how cells are arranged in space among Bacillus subtilis cells that make biofilm matrix, swim or form spores.
- Determine what roles specialized metabolites, compounds that bacteria release as signals, play in creating distinct cell types within Bacillus subtilis communities.
- Discover specialized metabolites from soil bacteria that act as signals between species, to expand knowledge of microbiome chemistry and obtain chemical tools to change bacterial physiology.
- Identify the genetic and molecular pathways that outside chemical signals use to change bacterial gene activity, cell-to-cell differences and metabolic activity.
More about the research
These communities shape soils, plants and animal hosts, yet scientists still know little about how the bacteria in them interact. Soil is one of the most diverse microbial habitats on Earth. It is also the source of most antibiotics, which makes the chemistry of soil bacteria both a basic biology puzzle and a source of possible new drugs.
Why it matters
Understanding how bacteria chemically control one another could provide new tools for steering microbial behavior in soils and other natural microbiomes. Newly found signaling compounds could also become leads for therapies, since soil microbes already supply most antibiotics. These advances may benefit environmental and therapeutic uses of bacteria.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Darcy McRose
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify redox-active metabolites (electron-shuttling small molecules) made natively in soils and map which ones are produced together across root-associated microbial communities, using newly developed screens.
Elizabeth Libby
Northeastern University, MA·Microbiology & Immunology
Quantitatively dissect how conserved Hanks-type serine/threonine kinase–phosphatase systems in Bacillus subtilis are wired, and how that architecture generates rare single cells with extreme phenotypes such as antibiotic resistance.
Javier Tabima Restrepo
Clark University, MA·Ecology & Evolution
Reconstruct the evolutionary relationships among Basidiobolus species, using genome sequences from fungal samples collected around the world.
The school
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School: 29 labs on PI Pages, $350M a year on research, 55 research doctorates a year.
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