Ankur Dalia, Ph.D.
Indiana University Bloomington
Dr. Ankur Dalia received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and was a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Biology at Indiana University Bloomington. He was awarded the Indiana University Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in 2019.
The main focus of research in the Dalia lab is to uncover the regulation and molecular mechanisms underlying natural transformation using the facultative bacterial pathogen Vibrio cholerae as a model system. Bacterial species can rapidly acquire novel traits like antibiotic resistance and virulence through horizontal gene transfer. One major mode of horizontal gene transfer is natural transformation–a physiological state in which some bacterial species can take up free DNA from the environment and integrate it into their genome by homologous recombination. Beyond furthering understanding of horizontal gene transfer, work in the Dalia lab has also provided fundamental insights into conserved bacterial processes including signal transduction, transcriptional regulation, extracellular surface appendages called pili and DNA metabolism. The lab also leverages its studies of natural transformation to develop novel genome editing technologies that are further employed to dissect the biology of bacterial species for both academic and industrial applications.
The main focus of research in the Dalia lab is to uncover the regulation and molecular mechanisms underlying natural transformation using the facultative bacterial pathogen Vibrio cholerae as a model system. Bacterial species can rapidly acquire novel traits like antibiotic resistance and virulence through horizontal gene transfer. One major mode of horizontal gene transfer is natural transformation–a physiological state in which some bacterial species can take up free DNA from the environment and integrate it into their genome by homologous recombination. Beyond furthering understanding of horizontal gene transfer, work in the Dalia lab has also provided fundamental insights into conserved bacterial processes including signal transduction, transcriptional regulation, extracellular surface appendages called pili and DNA metabolism. The lab also leverages its studies of natural transformation to develop novel genome editing technologies that are further employed to dissect the biology of bacterial species for both academic and industrial applications.