Nikhil Malvankar

Biophysicist (Yale) whose lab, working with cryo-EM structural biologist Edward Egelman, resolved the structures that overturned the Geobacter conductive-pili model — showing the conductive filaments are polymers of the cytochrome OmcS (Cell, 2019) and that the PilA pili are periplasmic secretory pseudopili (Nature, 2021). Matters to this vault as the second pole of the Geobacter nanowire dispute: originally trained within Derek Lovley's research lineage, he became senior author on the two model-overturning papers, neither of which lists Lovley as a co-author.

References

• claim-geobacter-conductive-filaments-are-omcs-cytochrome-polymers
• claim-geobacter-pili-are-secretory-pseudopili-not-nanowires
• claim-malvankar-lab-overturned-pili-model-without-lovley