Tak, Uday
Primary Appointment
Assistant Professor, Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology
Education
- BS, Biochemistry, Stony Brook University
- PhD, Microbiology, University of Alabama Birmingham
- Postdoc, Microbiology / Biochemistry, University of Colorado Boulder
Contact Information
Email: uday@virginia.edu
Website: https://www.taklaboratory.org/
Research Disciplines
Biochemistry, Biology, Biophysics, Biophysics & Structural Biology, Biotechnology, Computational Biology, Genetics, Immunology, Microbiology, Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Molecular Biology, Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics, Structural Biology
Research Interests
Prokaryotic immune systems, bacteriophage virology, programmed cell death, pore-forming proteins, evolution of immunity, cGAS-STING, protein engineering
Research Description
My laboratory studies the biological conflict between bacteria and the viruses that infect them: bacteriophages (phages). Bacteriophages are the most abundant entity on the planet, and are crucial for controlling bacterial populations, mediating cellular conflict, and evolving virulence factors in pathogens. Consequently, bacteria have evolved an arsenal of sophisticated innate immune systems (defense systems) that sense and neutralize phage replication, allowing them to survive and proliferate in diverse environments including human hosts. Several of these defense systems are evolutionary ancestors of eukaryotic immune systems including the cGAS-STING pathway, and offer mechanistic and evolutionary insight into the origins of antiviral innate immune signaling. In other cases, these predicted systems are entirely unique to bacteria, and represent new biological paradigms that are waiting to be discovered. We use an interdisciplinary approach including but not limited to molecular microbiology, biochemistry, electrophysiology, structural biology, fluorescence microscopy, membrane reconstitution, computational modeling, and bioinformatics. Our work has broad application ranging from uncovering fundamental principles of antiviral immunity shared between bacteria and humans, enhancing the efficacy of phage-based therapeutics to treat antibiotic-resistant infections, and identification of novel enzymes and chemical signals that can be engineered into immunotherapy to diagnose and treat human diseases. Currently the laboratory is interested in the following areas: I) Nucleic acid signaling systems in bacterial antiphage immunity and physiology II) Evolution and mechanisms of programmed cell death and innate immunity III) Bacteriophage isolation and virology IV) Engineering bacterial immune machinery into biotechnology to advance human health