Dr Teodora Mateeva

Senior Bioinformatician

 
I'm a Senior Bioinformatician specializing in Bacterial Genomics. I am currently working on a project aiming to map the bacterial capsule diversity across all species and use that knowledge to understand better the molecular evolution of the capsule-synthesising machinery.

My research 

Many bacteria have an extracellular structure positioned outside of the peptidoglycan cell envelope, commonly referred to as a capsule. Bacterial capsules can have a complex and varying composition being made of: polysaccharides, polypeptides, combinations of polysaccharides and polypeptides, poly-γ-D-glutamic acid, hyaluronic acid and others. Capsules are synthesized in both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, and the composition is determined largely by the synthesis pathway. Due to the importance of the capsule as a virulence factor, it has gained a lot of attention in the field of vaccination. However, there is little in-depth research of the capsule diversity across all species, particularly the capsule diversity in non-pathogenic bacteria. In my work, I perform large-scale analysis of the diversity of proteins taking part in different capsule synthesis pathways. I apply and develop ML-based and physics-based methods to learn more about the molecular evolution of the capsule machinery across different bacterial species. I am also interested in specific cases where mutations affect protein function and implicate capsule synthesis.

My timeline