Topic: Escherichia coli

In this talk I will discuss our recent findings that sensory signals from the brain adjust the physiology and behavior of the nematode C. elegans, enabling this animal to deal with the lethal threat of hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is the most common chemical threat in the microbial battlefield. Prevention and repair of the damage that hydrogen peroxide inflicts on macromolecules are critical for health and survival. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss our findings that C. elegans represses their own H2O2 defenses in response to sensory perception of Escherichia coli, t

Macromolecular protein complexes perform essential biological functions across life forms. A fundamental, though yet unsolved question in biology is how the function of such complexes is regulated by intracellular or extracellular signals. For instance, we have little understanding of how forces affect multi-protein machines whose function is often mechanical in nature. We address this question by studying the bacterial flagellar motor, a large complex that powers swimming motility in many bacteria. This rotary motor autonomously adapts to changes in mechanical load by adding or removing force

Single-cell measurements of mRNA copy numbers inform our understanding of stochastic gene expression, but these measurements coarse-grain over the individual copies of the gene, where transcription and its regulation take place stochastically. We recently combined single-molecule quantification of mRNA and gene loci to measure the transcriptional activity of an endogenous gene in individual Escherichia coli bacteria. When interpreted using a theoretical model for mRNA dynamics, the single-cell data allowed us to obtain the probabilistic rates of promoter switching, transcription initiation and