Robert Poole

Work in my laboratory is focussed on microbial physiology - the study of how bacteria and other microorganisms work. Although rooted in the tradition of bacterial growth and intermediary metabolism, microbial physiology now embraces molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry, and indeed any discipline that can shed light on bacterial function. Much of our experimental work is conducted with Escherichia coli, the pre-eminent ‘model’ organism with unrivalled ease of genetic and physiological manipulation. We are also work on its close relation, Salmonella (an intracellular pathogen and cause of enteritis), Campylobacter jejuni (the most common cause of food-borne disease), as well as Mycobacterium and Neisseria species. Special foci at present are bacterial respiratory chains and haemoglobins, nitrosative stress tolerance in bacteria, the biochemistry of CO interactions and oxygen metabolism.

The approaches used to study these problems range from molecular genetics, through microbial biochemistry and biophysics, to physiology and the properties of microbial populations in vitro and in vivo. Consequently, the tools we use are diverse; they include manipulations in vitro and in vivo of nucleic acids, bacterial molecular genetics (e.g. microarray technology, transposon-mediated and site-directed mutagenesis, gene and operon fusions), protein purification, immunochemical methods and characterisation using optical (dual- and multi-wavelength spectrophotometry) tools.