Research Overview

Bacterial stress responses allow cells to sense, adapt, and survive against various stressors in their environment. While the stress response networks are necessary for bacterial defense and survival, they can also contribute to the rise of antimicrobial resistance. Antimicrobial resistance is an alarming problem of the present and future. Understanding the biochemical and regulatory pathways that underlie this resistance is of utmost importance to tackle the growing threat of untreatable multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. Research in the Yadavalli lab is focused on two emerging themes in bacterial gene regulation: 
(i) Small regulatory proteins – proteins with less than 50 amino acids that directly translated from short open reading frames.
(ii) Epitranscriptomic proteins – epitranscriptomic regulators that connect RNA modifications and translation to metabolism and stress response.