Joseph Mougous


Joseph Mougous is an American microbiologist. He is the John F. Enders Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Yale University. He previously served as a Professor of Microbiology, the Lynn M. and Michael D. Garvey Endowed Chair in Gastroenterology, the Director of the Microbial Interactions & Microbiome Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the University of Washington. Mougous is best known for contributions to the field interbacterial antagonism, including discovering the antibacterial activity of the Type VI secretion system.

Education

Mougous graduated from Western Washington University with a BS in Chemistry in 1999. While there, he performed research in the laboratory of Professor David Patrick, using scanning tunnelling microscopy to study liquid crystals. Mougous was recognized as the Outstanding Chemistry Graduate at Western Washington University in 1999. He then pursued his Ph.D. at University of California-Berkeley under the mentorship of Carolyn Bertozzi, where he worked on the identification, characterization, and biosynthesis of sulfated metabolites in mycobacteria.
After receiving his PhD in 2004, Mougous joined the laboratory of John Mekalanos at Harvard Medical School as a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow. There, he demonstrated that a previously uncharacterized gene cluster in Pseudomonas aeruginosa encodes a specialized protein secretion system.

Research and career

Mougous joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington in 2008. He was the Lynn M. and Michael D. Garvey Endowed Chair in Gastroenterology and the Director of the Microbial Interactions & Microbiome Center at the University of Washington until 2025, when his laboratory relocated to Yale University.
In 2010, Mougous’ laboratory reported that the T6SS of P. aeruginosa targets toxins to other bacterial cells. Subsequently, Mougous and co-workers put forth the hypothesis that interbacterial antagonism is a general feature of the T6SS, and the Mougous lab was the first to demonstrate interspecies targeting by the T6SS. His group was also first to identify the molecular target of a T6SS antibacterial toxin, peptidoglycan, and they went on to identify numerous additional molecular targets of T6SS toxin superfamilies. The Mougous lab also contributed early findings supporting the concept that the T6SS helps shape the composition of human-associated microbial communities. In 2020, the Mougous group published a collaborative study with David R. Liu of Harvard University in which they repurposed a mutagenic antibacterial toxin from Burkholderia, DddA, into a genome editing tool designed for Mitochondrial DNA.
In addition to work on the T6SS, the Mougous lab demonstrated that the Esx pathway functions analogously to the T6SS in delivering toxins to competing bacterial cells. They described the genetic engineering of an epibiont from the Patescibacteria phylum, and they discovered that Streptomyces and other Actinobacteria secrete large antibacterial particles named umbrella toxins.

Honors and awards