Jack Gilbert
University of California-San Diego, CA·Microbiology & Immunology
Buildings cannot be kept free of infectious microbes. People bring bacteria in on their skin and in their lungs and sinuses, and surfaces that have been touched become routes of transmission.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Engineering
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
built environment microbiome
Bacillus subtilis
probiotic cleaning
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Engineer Bacillus subtilis strains through genetic manipulation to survive long-term inside porous building materials while retaining the ability to competitively exclude multi-drug resistant organisms from surfaces.
- Model the biochemistry of competition between Bacillus and pathogens on different surface materials, and use the model iteratively to guide strain design and material formulation.
- Integrate engineered Bacillus strains into composite building materials and quantify efficacy by measuring competitive exclusion of multi-drug resistant organisms and long-term strain viability.
- Survey building inhabitants to characterize perceived human and environmental health impacts of Bacillus-active materials, views on civic responsibility for them, and barriers to adoption, in order to define parameters for their use.
More about the research
Hospitals, with their dry, nutrient-poor surfaces, are a useful model for studying how drug resistance and virulence take hold and persist on building materials. Cleaning products containing spores of Bacillus, a common soil bacterium, have been shown to cut the abundance of multi-drug resistant organisms on hard surfaces by 50 to 89 percent compared with conventional cleaners, and preliminary data suggest Bacillus does this by outcompeting these pathogens for space and resources. The catch is that the effect requires repeatedly reapplying live Bacillus, which is impractical in most settings. This project asks whether the beneficial bacteria can instead be built into the building itself.
Why it matters
Multi-drug resistant organisms persisting on hospital and building surfaces are a direct source of infections, and current chemical cleaning must be repeated constantly to hold them back. Building materials that host engineered, long-lived Bacillus could suppress resistant pathogens continuously without reapplication, which may lower infection risk for patients and other building occupants. Surveying inhabitants about perceived risks and responsibility would also inform whether and how such living materials could acceptably be deployed.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Seunghyun Sim
University of California-Irvine, CA·Chemistry·Early-career
Build a high-throughput screen for enzyme activity using fluorescence-activated cell sorting, an instrument that sorts single particles by brightness, together with engineered chemical probes that fluoresce only when the displayed enzyme turns over its substrate.
Elizabeth Shank
University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, MA·Microbiology & Immunology
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.
Jeffrey Tabor
Rice University, TX·Microbiology & Immunology
Test how two Bacillus subtilis stress-response gene networks decode time-varying activity of their main transcription factors, using an optogenetic system to deliver constant or oscillatory light inputs.
The school
University of California-San Diego: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 637 research doctorates a year.
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