🧵 After years out of the field, I and my lab are again working on bacterial type IV pili. We have just posted our first preprints, and I'm excited to share what we have discovered.
This shows Neisseria gonorrheae bacteria infecting a human epithelical cell. Here, you can see the pili in red.
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Excitingly, we found that DNA uptake during natural transformation stimulates the DNA repair pathway through this transcriptional activator (DdaA) - since DNA enters the cell as ssDNA, DdaA can sense this ssDNA to activate expression of crucial DNA repair pathway genes including recA
This work is also a great reflection of a fun collaboration with @katehummels.bsky.social whose help with protein purification was critical for in vitro DNA binding assays!
While our work was ongoing, another group independently made the same discovery: academic.oup.com/nar/article/.... DdaA also regulates expression of phage defense genes, and Song et al. focused on this aspect of DdaA function while our group focused on its function upon DNA uptake by type IV pili