Transcriptional adaptation of intracellular P.aeruginosa.
Suzanne Fleiszig, Professor
Optometry
Closed. This professor is continuing with Spring 2026 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Fall 2026.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the most common cause of contact lens-mediated microbial keratitis. Our lab uses in-vitro and in-vivo models to study the adaptation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to the intracellular environment. Our recently published paper shows that intracellular bacteria persist in vacuoles, where they resist high-dose antibiotic treatment (https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.02742-22). Ongoing work is using Dual RNA sequencing to study the mechanisms underlying the increased resistance of intracellular bacteria.
Role: The student will be responsible for analyzing bacterial and host gene expression in R and Python. The student will learn culturing of mammalian epithelial cell lines and the validation of gene expression by qPCR.
Qualifications: Basic knowledge of R (OR) python pipelines to clean, analyze, visualize, and document transcriptomic data is required. Familiarity with querying public gene expression databases and working on the HPC cluster will be a plus.
Ideally we would like to recruit students who are interested in a multi-year commitment and able to apply for summer fellowships in 2023 (examples include SURF: surf.berkeley.edu.) It will be necessary to schedule the hours between 9a-5p for proper attention to training and supervision.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Naren G Kumar, Post-Doc
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Related website: http://fleiszig.vision.berkeley.edu
Biological & Health Sciences