Dr. Zach Lonergan

The chemical properties of the radical nitric oxide (NO) have been harnessed for biological processes across Domains. In humans, NO has several functions including as an important component of the immune response to pathogens. Despite robust NO production, bacteria like Pseudomonas aeruginosa establish chronic infections, posing a conundrum: how do bacteria overcome NO exposure to persist? Given the highly reactive nature of NO, we hypothesized that microbial adaptation relies on a coordinated response to intracellular toxicity and to a changing extracellular chemical landscape. However, microbe-dominant environments are often chemically complex and dynamic, which requires interdisciplinary approaches to understand these ecosystems. In my seminar, I will describe how we leveraged geochemical and biochemical methods to develop a molecular fingerprinting approach allowing us to track NO metabolism and reactivity with other molecules. Our results present a holistic understanding for how NO and the small molecule landscape can significantly influence microbial survival and establish new conceptual and technical handles to understand NO metabolism in nature and disease.