Expery Omollo, PhD

Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow · MIT

I am a systems biologist who studies how bacteria coordinate transcription, translation, and RNA decay to achieve precise gene expression.

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About

I am a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Gene-Wei Li lab at MIT Biology and HHMI. I study bacterial gene expression using systems level approaches, with a focus on how bacteria coordinate transcription, translation, and RNA decay to achieve precise control of gene expression.

For my postdoctoral work, I use system wide measurements and computational analysis to address these questions. During my PhD, I trained in biochemistry and structural biology and used in vitro assays and cryo-EM to study how bacterial RNA polymerase pauses, terminates, and responds to regulatory proteins during transcription.

Each of these projects is described in detail in the Research section.

Research

Transcription-Translation Coupling in bacteria

I study how RNA polymerase and ribosomes stay coordinated during gene expression.

Regulation of RNA polymerase by NusG

This project showed how NusG stabilizes a paused RNA polymerase in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Study was published in Molecular Cell (2023) .

Mechanism of Intrinsic transcription termination

This project revealed the first atomic structures that show, step by step, how intrinsic termination occurs in bacteria. Results were reported in Nature (2023) .