Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

Apoorva Bhatt’s research interests include studying pathogenic mycobacteria and how they cause disease, with a particular focus on Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB). This includes using a genetic approach to identify pathways involved in the biosynthesis of virulence-related metabolites.

Complex lipids play an important role in the biology of the bacterium as a large proportion of the genome contains genes proposed to be involved in lipid biosynthesis. The pathways involved in lipid biosynthesis thus merit a detailed study. A broad aim of Dr Bhatt’s research is to understand how mycobacterial lipids are made, and the impact they have on virulence. His lab uses a genetic approach to address these questions by generating mutant strains that are defective in these pathways.