Bacterial Biofilms and Host Defense Peptides: From Search Engines of Bacterial Social Behavior to Design Rules for Antimicrobals
Professor Gerard C.L. Wong
Bioengineering Department, UCLA Physics and Materials Sciences Departments, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Fung Auditorium
Abstract:
One of the unsolved problems in human health and disease is the control of pathogens, such as antibioticresistant forms of bacteria. In this talk, we will briefly describe three vignettes where physics-based approaches have been useful.
- Bacterial biofilms are structured multi-cellular communities that are notoriously resistant to antibiotics. By adapting algorithms from colloid physics, we translate bacteria movies into searchable databases of bacterial behavior and find new appendage-specific mechanisms for P. aeruginosa surface motility.
- We examine the mechanism of mammalian defensins, a prototypical family of host defense peptides, and show how we can use topology, coordination chemistry, and soft matter physics to construct a set of design rules for antimicrobials that punch holes in bacterial membranes.
- By using 3 rd generation synchrotrons to measure the density propagator of water, we show that it is possible to make movies of hydration structure and dynamics at femtosecond timescales and subAngstrom lengthscales. We use this Greens function method to explore water dynamics in confined geometries.
Biosketch:
Professor Gerard Wong (Bioengineering Dept. & California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA, adjunct professor at Physics Dept., Materials Science Dept., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is internationally known for his research on self-organization in biological systems using advanced synchrotron x-ray and microscopy techniques, and for innovative multi-disciplinary approaches to solving problems in biomedicine. Current areas of research include ultrafast chemical physics of hydration, antimicrobials for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, organization of bacterial communities, apoptosis protein based cancer therapeutics, drug delivery, water purification.
Dr. Wong received his B.S. degree in Physics from Caltech, and his Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley, followed by postdoctoral appointments at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam, and at UC Santa Barbara. His awards include the Apker Award from the American Physical Society, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and two Xerox Faculty Research Awards. Wong represented the U.S. in the US-Japan NSF-MEXT Symposium on Nanobiotechnology (2005), the Academica Sinica International Workshop on Soft Matter and Biophysics (2007), and the US-India NSFDST Nanoscience & Engineering Workshop (2008). He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Physical Review E.