Jue D. (Jade) Wang
Position title: Associate Professor
Email: wang@bact.wisc.edu
Phone: 608-263-0307
Address:
Bacteriology
Bacterial Stress Response, Nucleotide Signaling, Mutagenesis, Antibiotic Resistance
- Address
- 6478 Microbial Sciences Building
- Education
- Ph.D., University of California-San Francisco (2002), Postdoctoral Research: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Lab Website
- https://wanglab.bact.wisc.edu/
- Department
- Bacteriology
- Research Interests
- Bacterial Stress Response, Nucleotide Signaling, Mutagenesis, Antibiotic Resistance

Research Description:
Bacterial stress responses allow cells to survive fluctuating environments, antibiotic treatments, and host defenses. My current research aims to answer the following fundamental questions: How do bacteria utilize stress-induced small molecules to adapt to their specific environmental niches? How do bacteria enter a metabolically dormant persister state that is intrinsically tolerant to a broad array of antibiotic treatments? How do stressed bacteria mitigate potential conflicts between their DNA replication and transcription machineries to ensure survival? What are the molecular mechanisms of bacterial evolution to fit their specific niches? We combine metabolomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics with biochemical and evolutionary approaches to answer these questions. We study these processes in the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis and the Gram-negative bacterium Escherichia coli. These organisms grow fast and are highly amenable to genetic manipulation. Because the fundamentals of information processing mechanisms are conserved across all domains of life, our work in bacteria is broadly applicable to other, less tractable, systems.
Representative Publications:
Search PubMed for more publications by Jue D. (Jade) Wang
Kriel, A., Bittner, A.N., Kim S.H., Liu, K.Q., Tehranchi A.K., Zou W.Y., Rendon, S., Chen, R., Tu, B.P. and Wang, J.D. (2012) Direct Regulation of GTP Homeostasis by (p)ppGpp: A Critical Component of Viability and Stress Resistance. Molecular Cell, 48:231-41. PMC3483369.
Sankar TS, Wastuwidyaningtyas BD, Dong Y, Lewis SA, Wang JD. (2016). “The nature of mutations induced by replication–transcription collisions”, Nature. 535(7610):178-81. PMC4945378.
Yang J, Anderson BW, Turdiev A, Turdiev H, Stevenson DM, Amador-Noguez D, Lee VT, Wang JD. (2020) The nucleotide pGpp acts as a third alarmone in Bacillus, with functions distinct from those of (p) ppGpp. Nature Communications. 11(1):5388.
Anderson BW, Schumacher MA, Yang J, Turdiev A, Turdiev H, Schroeder JW, He Q, Lee VT, Brennan RG, Wang JD. (2022) The nucleotide messenger (p)ppGpp is an anti-inducer of the purine synthesis transcription regulator PurR in Bacillus. Nucleic Acids Research. PMID: 34967415.