Arbeitsgruppe Brochado
Junior Professor Dr. Ana Rita Brochad
Interfaculty Institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine
Auf der Morgenstelle 28
72076 Tübingen
Germany
Email: ana.brochado@uni-tuebingen.de
X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/AnaRitaBrochad1
Curriculum Vitae
Ana Rita Brochado was born in Porto (Portugal), and is a biological engineer by training. She received her PhD in Biotechnology in 2012 from the Technical University of Denmark. During her PhD in the lab of Prof. Dr. Kiran R. Patil, Ana studied the architecture and regulation of metabolic network of Saccharomyces cerevisiae using whole cell metabolic modelling approaches. Afterwards, she moved to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg to do her postdoctoral studies on high-throughput profiling of drug combinations in bacteria in the lab of Dr. Athanasios Typas. Ana started her independent junior group in 2019 at the Chair of Microbiology & Research Center for Infectious Diseases, University of Würzburg, supported by the Emmy Noether programme of the German Research Foundation. In 2020 Ana was awarded the Hector Research Career Development Award by the Hector Fellow Academy. Ana joined the Interfaculty Institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine Tübingen and the Cluster of Excellence "Controlling Microbes to Fight Infections" in 2023 as an assistance professor (with tenure track).
Research Interest
The Brochado lab studies how bacteria cope with drugs in their environment with goal is to expose druggable features to aid treatment design. In parallel, our overarching goal is to gain biological insight into how bacteria operate. We combine basic microbiology, high-throughput screening and systems biology approaches to tackle our questions with a comprehensive perspective that extends beyond conventional drug targets. Current projects in our lab focus on i) systematically understanding fast appearing multi-faceted intrinsic antibiotic resistance mutations in Enterobacteriacea, ii) uncovering the molecular mechanism of synergies against difficult-to-treat pathogens, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, iii) developing systematic approaches to unravel drug transport regulation in Gram-negative bacteria, and iv) investigating the interface between bacterial immunity (phage defence) and antibiotic response. Ultimately, we believe that bringing our molecular understanding on how bacteria cope with their environment to a systems level will enable efficient strategies to fight the spread of antibiotic resistance.
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Selected Publications
Brenzinger S, Airoldi M, Ogunleye AJ, Jugovic K, Amstalden MK, and Brochado AR*. The Vibrio cholerae CBASS phage defence system modulates resistance and killing by antifolate antibiotics". Nat Microbiol. 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01556-y.
Cacace E, Kim V,... Brochado AR... Typas A. Systematic analysis of drug combinations against Gram-positive bacteria. Nat Microbiol. 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01486-9.
Domenech A, Brochado AR, Sender V, Hentrich K, Henriques-Normark B, Typas A and Veening JW. Proton Motive Force Disruptors Block Bacterial Competence and Horizontal Gene Transfer. Cell Host Microbe 2020. DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2020.02.002.
Brochado AR, Telzerow A, Bobonis J, Banzhaf M, Mateus A, Selkrig J, Huth E, Bassler S, Zamarreño Beas J, Zietek M,Ng N, Foerster S, Ezraty B, Py B, Barras F, Savitski MM, Bork P, Göttig S and Typas A. Species-specific activity of antibacterial drug combinations. Nature 2018. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0278-9.