Jai Tree
Jai Tree is an Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney working on bacterial RNA biology, with a particular focus on how small regulatory RNAs control virulence, stress responses, and antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria. His lab combines molecular microbiology, RNA biology, and transcriptomics to understand how bacteria adapt during infection and survive antimicrobial treatment.
Over the past decade, his research has helped uncover how RNA–RNA interaction networks control gene expression in pathogens including Staphylococcus aureus and pathogenic E. coli. His group has contributed to the development and application of transcriptome-wide approaches for studying bacterial RNA regulation, helping to reveal new mechanisms that control toxin production, virulence, and antimicrobial resistance. More recently, the lab has been exploring how bacterial RNA decay pathways might be exploited for new antimicrobial strategies using antisense oligonucleotides for programmable RNA decay.
Jai completed his PhD at the University of Queensland and undertook postdoctoral research at The Roslin Institute, Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology (University of Edinburgh, UK), and Peter Doherty Institute (University of Melbourne) before joining the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences at UNSW Sydney.
Outside the lab, Jai is involved in teaching, postgraduate research training, and is an active member of the ASM.
Abstracts this author is presenting: