Prof. DENG Xin (鄧新)

Dr Deng received his Bachelor and Master degrees in Microbiology from China Agricultural University. He completed PhD in Genetics at the Kansas State University and postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago. He is interested in bacterial virulence, including gene regulation, signalling pathways, and RNA epigenetics. His research lies on the interface of multi-disciplinary approaches with the ultimate goal of developing novel therapies to combat bacterial infection. More information can be found at the group website.

The emergence and spread of various multidrug-resistant bacterial strains have posed alarming challenges to public health and agriculture worldwide. Public demand for new antibiotics is enormous, yet drug development pipelines of the pharmaceutical industry started to run dry with limited targets available for inventing new bactericidal antibiotics. It is important to uncover potential therapeutic targets. Our group has been working on virulence regulation in the human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa and plant pathogen Pseudomonas syringae, which are of world-wide importance. These pathogens rely on quorum sensing systems and type III secretion system to invade their hosts, which is finely regulated by a group of transcription factors and signalling pathways. Research in our group has led to the identification of a variety of new virulence-associated two-component systems, transcription factors and their molecular mechanisms. We have mapped the transcription factor-based regulatory networks for both superbugs. Tuning their expression and developing inhibitors are key for the development of strategies to control Pseudomonas infections. Our work also demonstrates that RNA modifications exist in a wide-range of bacterial species, which suggests their potential important roles in gene regulation.