A UC San Diego professor will receive a total of $1.5 million over five years in support of his studies on how bacterial cells communicate with each other via electrical signals, similar to the way neurons transmit messages in the brain, it was announced Thursday.
Molecular biology professor Gürol Süel is one of 84 scholars across the nation to be awarded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Süel studies how bacteria coordinate their behavior to collectively organize into communities called biofilms, which have a higher resilience against antibiotics.
“Much of our understanding of electrical signaling in our brains is based on structural studies of bacterial ion channels” Süel said.
Süel received his doctorate in molecular biophysics from the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center in 2003. He began his career at UC San Diego in 2012.
