Malvankar's lab published the structural work overturning the Geobacter pili-nanowire model without Lovley as co-author

Nikhil Malvankar's early work on Geobacter sulfurreducens nanowire conductivity was done within Derek Lovley's research lineage; the original e-pili conductivity claims trace to that collaboration. The two papers that structurally overturned the PilA-nanowire model — the OmcS cryo-EM structure (Cell, 2019) and the secretory-pili structure (Nature, 2021) — were both produced with Edward Egelman's cryo-EM collaboration and with Malvankar as senior author, and neither lists Lovley as a co-author.

Lovley continued to defend the pili model in print. In "Untangling Geobacter sulfurreducens Nanowires" (mBio, 2022) he disputed a paper (Ye et al.) that de-emphasized e-pili in favor of cytochrome filaments, arguing: "If this was true, then the filaments emanating from the control strain must have all been e-pili because they are all absent in the ΔPilB strain." That exchange is technically Lovley versus a separate group (Ye, Liu, Nealson, Zhou, Rensing), not a direct Lovley-versus-Malvankar rebuttal — but it documents Lovley still holding the e-pili position in 2022, a year after Malvankar's own lab had published structural evidence that the pili do not function as nanowires at all.

[interpretation — not directly sourced] The framing that Malvankar personally "broke from" Lovley is a synthesis of the authorship pattern plus Lovley's continued defense, not a statement either scientist makes in the sources fetched. What is directly sourced is narrower and firmer: the model- overturning papers exclude Lovley, and Lovley kept defending e-pili after them.