Kroos Lab Members

Visiting Research Associates

Ramya Rajagopalan is a postdoc investigating commitment to stages of development in Myxococcus xanthus during starvation and the role played by the transcription factors MrpC and FruA in regulating commitment. She is also investigating regulation of the dev operon in the lab strain DK1622 and in certain wild isolates of M. xanthus. She received her PhD from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she studied cellular differentiation and pattern formation in the nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium Anabaena PCC 7120.

PhD Candidates

Yinjiao Ma is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Genetics Program.  She is doing her first rotation in the Kroos lab, using chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) followed by PCR or Solexa sequencing to identify MrpC and FruA binding sites in the Myxococcus xanthus genome.

Undergraduate Students

Ashleigh Campbell is an undergraduate majoring in Lyman Briggs Diagnostic Molecular Science. She is studying the Myxococcus xanthus dev operon, specifically the promoter region. She is currently working to map MrpC2 and FruA binding sites near the dev promoter using electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSAs) and examining the effects that deletions and mutations have on promoter activity.

Ben Labbe is an undergraduate majoring in Genetics and Molecular Genomics through Lyman Briggs. He is currently studying the role of FruA and MrpC in development of Myxococcus xanthus. By using a histidine-tagged FruA for column chromatography, he hopes to identify the proteins that bind to FruA during the developmental process. Additionally, he is attempting to determine if it is necessary for M. xanthus to produce a smaller form of the MrpC protein during development.

Yang Zhang is a Genetics major interested in regulated intramembrane proteolysis. He is trying to solve the structure of SpoIVFB, a Bacillus subtilis intramembrane-cleaving metalloprotease. He has used disulfide crosslinking to test the interaction between SpoIVFB and its substrate. He also works on RasP and RsiW. RasP is another intramembrane metalloprotease of B. subtilisand RsiW is supposed to be its substrate. He is trying to reconstitute the cleavage process in vitro and determine the cleavage site.

Jiajun (Brian) Zhou is a senior in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. He is using E. coli to study the interaction of the Bacillus subtilis SpoIVFB intramembrane metalloprotease with Pro-σK. He is making mutations in both the enzyme and its substrate, and plans to use pull-down assays to test the effects on interaction.