My work focuses on antibiotic resistance in bacterial swarms.

Many bacterial swarms display a temporary, non-mutational, and reversible resistance to antibiotics in a phenomenon called as ‘adaptive resistance'. We discovered the process of ‘necrosignaling’ where dead cells of an E. coli swarm population release a periplasmic protein AcrA that binds to the outer membrane protein TolC of live cells within the same population. This binding acts as a signal to increase the activity of efflux pumps which contributes to the establishment of adaptive resistance to various antibiotics.

Currently, I am working on to elucidate the evolutionary mechanism and significance of this temporary resistance in relation to its ability to make the population gain genetic resistance.

Previously, I did my PhD at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in the field of prokaryotic protein synthesis initiation.