Christopher Brown
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Tuberculosis spreads when bacteria ride on tiny droplets coughed into the air, and to infect a new person the bacteria must survive the trip. That survival step, drying out in air, is poorly understood at the molecular level, even though blocking it would stop transmission rather than just treat established disease.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biochemistry
- Topics
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
TB transmission
aerosol survival
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Expose laboratory and clinical strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to air-drying stress and document the resulting changes in metabolism and cell envelope integrity.
- Test the hypothesis that desiccation induces an adaptive metabolic response in M. tuberculosis, using metabolomic profiling of small molecules before and after drying.
- Determine which metabolic pathways are essential for survival in air by silencing candidate genes with CRISPR interference and measuring survival after drying.
- Identify bacterially encoded determinants of successful transmission that could serve as targets for inhibitors aimed at halting spread of tuberculosis.
More about the research
This project asks what genes and metabolic pathways Mycobacterium tuberculosis uses to stay alive while airborne, with the longer-term idea that those pathways could be drug targets.
Why it matters
Tuberculosis remains a major cause of global illness and death, and current drugs treat people who are already sick rather than interrupting spread. Identifying bacterial factors that let M. tuberculosis survive aerosolization could open a different strategy: transmission-blocking therapies that prevent infection of new contacts.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anna Tischler
University of Minnesota, MN·Microbiology & Immunology
Build Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains whose phenylalanine-making enzymes can be switched on or off, and use them in macrophage and mouse infections to measure how much the bacterium needs this amino acid pathway during disease.
Katerina Darwin
New York University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether host-derived aldehydes, reactive products of normal metabolism, act as immune effectors against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, using bacterial and mouse genetics plus biochemistry and cell biology.
Craig D Ellermeier
University of Iowa, IA·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify which enzymes form the unusual 3-3 and the common 4-3 peptidoglycan crosslinks in the C. difficile cell wall, and how their ratio is regulated, using genetics, biochemistry and microscopy.
The school
Weill Medical College of Cornell University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 59 research doctorates a year.
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