Department of Molecular Biosciences
Dynamic Single-Cell Profiling of Host-Pathogen Interactions
Bacterial infections are dynamic and heterogeneous, yet the bulk of our understanding of infectious disease has come from static, population-level measurements. What if we could just watch host and pathogen responses in individual cells as an infection progresses – what would we learn about infection? The Lane lab is focused on developing tools and approaches to explore the time dimension, or dynamics, of bacterial infection in individual cells. We take an interdisciplinary approach, integrating live-cell microscopy with global single-cell profiling technologies to make quantitative, dynamic, single-cell measurements during bacterial infection. Our goal is to determine how decisions made in individual host and bacterial cells influence infection outcome, with the long-term goal of identifying novel strategies to engineer cellular behavior to control infection outcome.