Ben Bratton
Assistant Professor, Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology
The scientific approaches used by our lab borrow heavily from the domains of microbial genetics, light microscopy, optogenetics, biophysics, computational image processing, and machine learning. While some specific projects are focused in one area, an interdisciplinary approach is crucial to understand, manipulate, and utilize the biophysical principles underlying bacterial cell biology. Targeting the bacterial cell wall has been one of the greatest successes of antibiotics, and I am therefore interested in the molecular factors that govern cell wall biosynthesis and cell shape. Three major focuses of my lab are understanding the biophysical mechanisms modulating cell shape, advancing multidimensional reconstructions of bacterial cell shape, and developing subcellular optogenetic tools to control bacterial growth.