Laboratory of

Dr. Amanda M. Brown, PhD

As a graduate student pursuing a doctoral degree in Microbiology and Immunology in the laboratory of Dr. William Jacobs Jr. at The Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Amanda developed an interest in macrophage-pathogen biology. The pathogen was tuberculosis, a bacterium that use multiple mechanisms to evade the host response to persist and grow inside macrophages.

Interested in the idea that the ability to persist in a hostile intracellular microenvironment would require protein secretion machinery, she developed an approach using resistance to azide to clone and characterize the mycobacterial homolog of the central secretory factor known at that time, as SecA.