Prof Teuta Pilizota

Biography

Teuta completed her diploma in physics at the University of Zagreb before moving to do a DPhil in single-molecule biophysics at the University of Oxford. In 2008 commenced her postdoctoral work at Princeton University, where she established the experimental and theoretical framework needed to study bacterial pressure regulation at a single-cell level. In 2013 she was appointed a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh where she established her research laboratory. She was appointed a Professor of Biophysics at the University of Edinburgh in August 2020 and moved to Cavendish Laboratory in 2024.

Research

To stay alive, bacteria, like other living cells, transduce energy. Two of its main sources are the ATP molecule, and the electrochemical gradients of ions, often called the ion motive forces (IMF). Because bacteria are unicellular, the electrical nature of energy production is tightly coupled with all the other processes in the cell. For example, the electrical potential across the membrane is generated by the charge accumulated at the membrane, which drives all ions. However, ions are also driven by specific chemical concentration differences, where the exact concentration of ions in the cell matters too. Lastly, bacteria maintain significant osmotic pressures, which depend on the difference between the extracellular and intracellular concentrations of all solutes, including ions. Teuta wishes to understand this intertwined regulation of ion flows in bacterial cells, including the links with ATP generation, osmotic pressure maintenance, and homeostasis of certain intracellular ion concentrations. By doing so, she hopes to uncover the fundamental principles behind free energy preservation and offer an operational definition of ‘dead’ and ‘alive’ grounded in the physics of free energy flows.

While focused mostly on fundamental science, Teuta has a significant track record of effectively translating research findings for industry application, including co-funding a start-up company OGI Bio Ltd (https://ogibio.co.uk/)