Biology Seminar Series Dr. George O'Toole Dartmouth College Molecular Biology and Microbiology

To Build a Biofilm
Polymicrobial infections represent a significant challenge. For example, despite significant successes developing new therapeutics to treat the underlying causes of cystic fibrosis (CF) and substantial efforts to target the microbes associated with airway damage, infections associated with CF are still a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. A major cause of persistent, drug-recalcitrant infections in persons with CF is their polymicrobial nature. The ability of polymicrobial communities to cause disease, persist in vivo and withstand higher concentrations of antimicrobial agents is multifactorial and incompletely understood. Emerging evidence suggests that microbial community composition dramatically alters the ability of antimicrobial agents to eradicate infections - such interactions among microbes can result in decreased antimicrobial efficacy in vivo. Furthermore, polymicrobial lung infections are associated with worse prognoses. I will discuss our recent efforts to leverage large clinical data sets from person with CF to develop a new in vitro, polymicrobial community model, and describe how we deploy this model to begin to understand mechanisms of microbial interactions and community function.  I also argue that our system can serve as novel antimicrobial screening platform and as “model” community to study microbial interactions more broadly.

Dr. George O’Toole:  I joined the Geisel School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in 1999 and was promoted to Professor in 2010. I received my PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Dr. Jorge Escalante-Semerena and performed postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School as a Damon-Runyon and a Hood Fellow with Dr. Roberto Kolter. My honors include the NSF Career Award, Dupont Young Investigator Award and Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, election as a fellow of AAAS and the American Academy of Microbiology, serving as an Editor for the Journal of Bacteriology and receiving the 2025 ASM Graduate Education Award. I have worked in bacterial systems for ~20 years. My lab has published extensively in the area of P. aeruginosa-host interactions in the context of CF, including polymicrobial airway infections.  My lab also studies early bacterial biofilm formation by pseudomonads, with a focus on surface sensing and c-di-GMP signaling networks.