Joseph (Joe) Dillard

PhD

Professor

jpdillard@wisc.edu

Office: (608) 265-2837, Laboratory: 265-0489

4157 Microbial Sciences Building

Joe Dillard, PhD, sometimes manages to break himself away from the computer long enough to do experiments in the lab. Recently, he purified peptidoglycan fragments from culture supernatants for a collaborative project on Vibrio fischeri. Last year he made gonococcal mutants with epitope-tagged versions of peptidoglycan degradation proteins AmiC and LtgC. Gonococci have an unusually-small set of peptidoglycan degradation proteins, and those proteins are found in different places in the gonococcal cell and have different interactions with other peptidoglycan processing proteins than are seen in model bacteria. Understanding the biochemical functions and protein interactions of the peptidoglycan degradation enzymes will allow us to determine how gonococci make and modify the peptidoglycan fragments that cause the damage to Fallopian tube cells in PID.