Prof. Supreet's Talk

Feb 25, 2010 - 16:00

Feb 25, 2010 - 17:30

Room No 118 (Creativity Hall)

Seminars

Prof. Supreet Saini Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign USA.

Abstract: Bacterial infections are responsible for more than three million deaths each year in India. One of the leading causes of infections is the food-borne pathogen Salmonella. Once ingested Salmonella specifically targets epithelial cells in the small intestine for invasion. From the perspective of the bacterium it is important that the genes responsible for invasion are only expressed at its preferred site of infection. How Salmonella exhibits this control remains an open question. The Salmonella infection process involves three major cellular processes - motility (to reach the site of infection) invasion (to gain access into host cells) and adherence (to persist in the small intestine). In this talk using both experimental and computational approaches I demonstrate that all three processes are tightly regulated by genetic networks that limit expression only to conditions in small intestine. In addition the three systems regulate each other to ensure their correct timing of activation during infection thus forming a distributed control strategy. This systems-level understanding of the Salmonella infection process is the first to quantitatively determine how multiple factors contribute towards the infection cycle. This research has provided novel insights regarding Salmonella pathogenesis and may discover new targets for antibiotics and vaccines.About the speaker: Supreet Saini received his B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2005. As an undergraduate researcher at IIT Delhi he worked with Professor A. N. Bhaskarwar on Characterization of Ethanol blended Micro-emulsion fuel and with Professor K. D. P. Nigam on Performance analysis of helical tube-in-tube heat exchangers. In 2005 he joined Professor Christopher V. Rao’s group in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). At UIUC in collaboration with Prof. Rao Professor James M. Slauch and Professor Phillip D. Aldridge he has been working on understanding regulatory genetic networks that govern pathogenesis in the bacterium Salmonella. In 2008 he received M.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from UIUC. For the last three years Supreet has also been a Research mentor for undergraduate researchers a Teaching Assistant and a Department Tutor for Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UIUC. Supreet will be defending his Ph.D. thesis in May 2010. His hobbies include reading post-colonization Indian history and playing squash. He is also a member of the organization ASHA for Education and through them works to make education accessible to underprivileged children in India.