Sujit Datta
California Institute of Technology, CA·Biophysics·Early-career
Microbes rarely live in open water. They live in crowded, squishy, or porous surroundings: mucus, tissue, gels, soil, sediment.
- Fields
Biophysics
Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
mucus
mucins
mucin glycans
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Evaluate how mucin glycans, the sugar chains attached to the proteins forming mucus, select for particular microbes within natural microbial communities.
- Identify how individual mucus components influence the spatial structure of complex microbial communities, determining which species sit next to which and why.
- Determine the mechanisms by which mucus regulates the assembly of microbial communities over time.
- Measure how pore-scale confinement alters the swimming of single flagellated bacteria, using 3D-printed porous media with controlled pore structure plus microscopy and mathematical modeling.
- Test how interactions between bacterial cells drive collective behavior and self-organization in porous media, linking cell and medium properties to group-level motion.
More about the research
How the physics and chemistry of those surroundings decide which microbes thrive, where they go, and how they organize is still an open question. Two projects tackle it from different directions, one at the level of whole microbial communities in mucus, the other at the level of individual swimming cells moving through pore spaces.
Why it matters
Explaining how mucus governs its resident microbes could suggest ways to protect people from infection, to harness beneficial microbes for digestion or salt tolerance in humans and animals, and to engineer mucus-inspired materials that steer microbial communities. Predicting bacterial movement through porous materials could assist with treating infections, microbial drug delivery, agricultural use of soil bacteria, bioremediation, and the design of synthetic microswimmers for sensing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Melinda Engevik
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify the bacterial compounds produced directly from the breakdown of mucin glycoproteins by gut bacteria, using metabolomics.
Nuris Figueroa-Morales
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Physics·Early-career
Derive a slender body theory, a model of thin moving filaments, for a single bacterial flagellum in a nematic liquid crystal, and test it with experiments and simulations of the Ericksen-Leslie and Beris-Edwards fluid models.
Carolyn Brook Ibberson
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Microbiology & Immunology
Map the three-dimensional metabolic landscape of polymicrobial chronic wound communities at micron scale, combining confocal imaging, imaging mass spectrometry and spatial metatranscriptomics with the team's computational pipeline.
The school
California Institute of Technology: 18 labs on PI Pages, $445M a year on research, 200 research doctorates a year.
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