Jing Yan

About

Jing Yan is an assistant professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding the biochemical and biophysical interactions within bacterial biofilm communities, particularly those formed by Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium responsible for cholera. Her work aims to uncover how bacteria recognize each other, adhere to surfaces, and then disperse to form new colonies, which is crucial for developing strategies to combat biofilm-related infections that are resistant to antibiotics. Yan's research employs a combination of genetics, microscopy, simulations, and biochemical analyses to investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying biofilm formation and dispersal. She has contributed to revealing that the extracellular matrix of biofilms, mainly composed of exopolysaccharides (EPS), is not inherently sticky but instead plays a role in excluding non-contributing cells, effectively acting as a membership marker. Her findings also show that as biofilms age, bacteria remodel their surfaces to switch interactions from attraction to repulsion, facilitating dispersal and colonization of new environments. Yan's work provides significant insights into the complex dynamics of bacterial communities and has implications for developing new approaches to treat biofilm-associated infections.

Research topics

• Biology
• Materials science
• Microbiology
• Genetics
• Nanotechnology
• Chemistry
• Physics
• Quantum mechanics
• Business
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Cephalopod-inspired versatile design based on plasmonic VO2 nanoparticle for energy-efficient mechano-thermochromic windows

  Nano Energy · 2020 · 123 citations

  DOI

• Roadmap on emerging concepts in the physical biology of bacterial biofilms: from surface sensing to community formation

  Physical Biology · 2021 · 95 citations

  Bacterial biofilms are communities of bacteria that exist as aggregates that can adhere to surfaces or be free-standing. This complex, social mode of cellular organization is fundamental to the physiology of microbes and often exhibits surprising behavior. Bacterial biofilms are more than the sum of their parts: single-cell behavior has a complex relation to collective community behavior, in a manner perhaps cognate to the complex relation between atomic physics and condensed matter physics. Bio…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Morphogenesis and cell ordering in confined bacterial biofilms

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 92 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  biofilms embedded in hydrogels as they grow by four orders of magnitude from their initial size. We show that the morphodynamics and cell ordering in embedded biofilms are fundamentally different from those of biofilms on flat surfaces. Treating embedded biofilms as inclusions growing in an elastic medium, we quantitatively show that the stiffness contrast between the biofilm and its environment determines biofilm morphology and internal architecture, selecting between spherical biofilms with no…

  DOI

• Searching for the Secret of Stickiness: How Biofilms Adhere to Surfaces

  Frontiers in Microbiology · 2021 · 70 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  . Techniques used to characterize biofilm adhesion are also reviewed. An understanding of biofilm adhesion strategies can guide the development of novel approaches to inhibit or manipulate biofilm adhesion and growth.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lipoarabinomannan mediates localized cell wall integrity during division in mycobacteria

  Nature Communications · 2024-03-11 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access

  The growth and division of mycobacteria, which include clinically relevant pathogens, deviate from that of canonical bacterial models. Despite their Gram-positive ancestry, mycobacteria synthesize and elongate a diderm envelope asymmetrically from the poles, with the old pole elongating more robustly than the new pole. The phosphatidylinositol-anchored lipoglycans lipomannan (LM) and lipoarabinomannan (LAM) are cell envelope components critical for host-pathogen interactions, but their physiolog…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Multiscale Analysis and Simulation of Biofilm Mechanics

  NSF · $522k · 2022–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Japinder Nijjer

  Yale University

  29 shared

• Steve Granick

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  28 shared

• Bonnie L. Bassler

  Howard Hughes Medical Institute

  28 shared

• Howard A. Stone

  25 shared

• Qiuting Zhang

  Fuzhou University

  20 shared

• Ned S. Wingreen

  Princeton University

  18 shared

• Rich Olson

  Wesleyan University

  16 shared

• Jung‐Shen B. Tai

  University of Colorado Boulder

  13 shared

Labs

• Yale Biofilm Research LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Materials Science and Engineering

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2014

• BS, Chemistry

  Peking University

  2009

Awards & honors

• Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2026)

Similar researchers at Yale University

• Luciano Floridih-120
• John Laffertyh-81
• Steven Tangh-49