We are excited to welcome our new post-doctoral fellow, Ankan Choudhury, to the Greathouse Lab! As a doctoral student under the guidance of Dr. Chris Kearney in the Baylor Department of Biology, Ankan worked on synthesizing novel Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and modifying them to target specific pathogens like Staphylococcus aureus and H. pylori. His work also involved creating bioengineered probiotic lactic acid bacteria that would deliver such guided AMPs in the physiological system and fight the pathogenic infection without destroying the microbiome like conventional antibiotics.
In the Greathouse Lab, his post-doctoral research will involve 1) exploring key bacterial markers in the gut microbiomes of colon cancer patients and identifying key dietary indicators that are crucial in maintaining a healthy gut microbiome for such patients which will improve their response to chemotherapy/ immunotherapy and increase survivability, 2) understanding the role of indole and indole-derived metabolites in the biofilm formation procedure of key species of gut microbiome and their influence on turning the species into an opportunistic pathogen, and 3) exploring the role of nucleic acid load of outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) of pathogenic strains Bacteroides fragilis and determining the fate of such OMVs and their cargo upon entering host cells, using click-chemistry aided fluorophore tagging.