Faculty

Anil Ojha, PhD Assistant Professor E-mail: ano7@pitt.edu Phone: 412-648-8058 Fax: 412-383-8926 Address: 603 Parran Hall 130 DeSoto Street Pittsburgh, PA 15261

Education

PhD; Jawaharlal Nehru University, India; 2002
Post-doctoral fellow; University of Pittsburgh; 2007

Research Summary

Mycobacterium tuberculosis- the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB)- kills about 2 million people in the world every year and is harbored by one-third (2 billion) of the world’s population, thereby posing a huge problem for the global public health. One of the major challenges in the contemporary drug development for tuberculosis is to reduce the duration of 6 to 9 month-long chemotherapy, which is necessary to eliminate residual drug tolerant bacilli that survive an extended exposure to antibiotics. This long duration of treatment often remains incomplete due to patient’s noncompliance and can result in reemergence of the infection with multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extremely drug resistant (XDR) strains. Designing new drugs for a shorter treatment of TB however requires a better knowledge about the pathogen’s persistence against antibiotics.

Microbes have strong propensity to grow as biofilms- genetically controlled and organized assemblages of individual cells encased in extracellular matrix- that display unique stress tolerant phenotype not displayed by single-cell planktonic bacteria. The stress endurance of a biofilm population is likely a combination of physical protection provided by the extracellular matrix and physiological tolerance acquired by a small sub-population growing within the heterogeneous microenvironments of the multicellular structure.

Research in my lab is focused on understanding how the spontaneous nature of M. tuberculosis to grow as an organized community influences its ability to endure antibiotics and other stresses. We use a combination of molecular genetics, biochemical, and functional genomics approach to ask specific questions such as:

1) What regulatory mechanisms control the growth and development of M. tuberculosis biofilms, and whether these mechanisms also regulate fitness of the pathogen against antibiotics?

2) What genetic elements promote the fitness of M. tuberculosis against antibiotics, and whether these elements also regulate the development of biofilms.

Recent Publications

• Ojha AK, Baughn AD, Sambandan D, Hsu T, Trivelli X, Guerardel Y, Alahari A, Kremer L, Jacobs WR Jr, Hatfull GF. (2008) Growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis biofilms containing free mycolic acids and harboring drug tolerant bacteria. Mol. Microbiology, 69,164-174.

• Ojha AK, Hatfull GF. (2007). The role of iron in Mycobacterium smegmatis biofilm formation: The exochelin siderophore is essential in limiting iron conditions for biofilm formation but not for planktonic growth. Molecular Microbiology, 66, 468-83.

• Ojha AK, Anand M, Bhatt A, Kremer L, Jacobs WR Jr., Hatfull GF. (2005).GroEL1: A dedicated chaperone involved in mycolic acid biosynthesis during biofilm formation
in mycobacteria. Cell, 123, 861-73