Dr Martin Welch

Work in the lab is focused on understanding how bacterial populations sense and respond to one another and specific environmental challenges, and how they modulate their behaviour accordingly. In particular, we focus on how these factors affect virulence in a gram-negative model organism and opportunistic human pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. A special area of interest is in defining how changes in lifestyle (planktonic versus biofilm) influence cell-cell signaling and virulence factor production. Our work combines state-of-the-art proteomic, transcriptomic and metabolomic analyses with conventional molecular microbiological and biochemical approaches.