Event
BIOE Seminar: Mini-bioreactors to elucidate bacterial comms in the vaginal and upper respiratory...
Friday, May 9, 2025
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
A. James Clark Hall, Room #2121
Gregg Duncan
gaduncan@umd.edu
Corine Jackman Burden
Assistant Professor
University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC)
Mini-bioreactors to elucidate bacterial communication in the vaginal and upper respiratory tract
Abstract
Microbial interactions have a vital role in human health and disease. Although infection is often detected at the macroscale, bacteria first colonize and interact with members of their community at high local densities at the microscale before the infection progresses to a detectable level. To investigate how bacteria interact at the microscale I adapted and implemented a microfluidic platform that enables high-parallel cultivation of bacteria to dissect and characterize microbial interactions. Cultivation takes place in aqueous droplets suspended in oil emulsion, creating thousands of monodisperse mini-bioreactors. My dissertation work evaluated and validated microdroplets as an effective tool for recapitulating interactions between two common vaginal bacteria and developed a novel ex-vivo model system to culture the common and fastidious vaginal bacterium, Lactobacillus iners, in droplets containing vaginal fluid. My postdoctoral work focuses on developing a microfluidic device that keeps droplets static to investigate single-cell dynamics of a cell-signaling virulence determinant in Streptococcus pneumoniae. This technology enables measurement of cell density and assessment of the effect of environmental cues on signaling at the single-cell and population levels, as well as the role of heterogeneity as it emerges within and across populations. This microfluidic platform provides detailed single cell, pairwise interaction, and subpopulation-level insight that is not attainable using conventional techniques. This work is critical for additional human microbiome interactions in the gut, oral passage, and skin, but other sites including the soil, the atmosphere, and aquatic environments. Future implications of this work will inform how cell-cell communication contributes to disease, will help develop new diagnostics and therapeutics as well as gain new insights into microbial community behavior in environmental niches.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Jackman Burden is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Investigating microbial interactions with implications for precision medicine, her research explores how cell-cell communication shapes women's health and disease and the upper respiratory tract. Dr. Burden’s laboratory employs microfluidic technologies to elucidate microbe-host interactions at the microscale, shedding light on microbial heterogeneity and its implications for health outcomes. Her doctoral research validated microdroplets as a model system for studying cellular interactions, developing ex vivo models using vaginal fluid with clinical applications. She later expanded her expertise during her postdoctoral studies, where she examined infection mechanisms of Streptococcus pneumoniae, a major upper respiratory pathogen, using microdroplet techniques to analyze single-cell communication. By integrating microdroplets and other microfluidic platforms, her team is pioneering new ways to study microbial behavior, environmental cues, and their impact on host health. With broad applications in precision medicine, Dr. Burden’s work aims to inform the development of novel strategies for disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Dr. Burden is a dedicated educator and mentor, committed to representation and belonging in STEM fields. She actively collaborates with interdisciplinary teams to translate her findings into impactful biomedical solutions. Dr. Burden earned her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Howard University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan.
