Past seminars since 2016

Room: Lecture hall Host: Prof. Dr. Victor Sourjik

The intricate machinery of the bacterial flagellar motor and its regulation

Guest Speaker Talk
The bacterial flagellar motor is a membrane-embedded rotary macromolecular machine that converts the electrochemical energy of the proton gradient into the mechanical energy of rotation. The knowledge about the bacterial motor is a source of inspiration for nanotechnology and one of the first steps towards making artificial motors on the same scale. Recent breakthrough electron cryotomography studies have revealed proteinaceous periplasmic structures adjacent to the stator (the powerhouse) of polar flagellar motors, which are essential for the stator assembly and function. The talk will showcase the cutting-edge research on the structure, composition, and function of the periplasmic scaffold in the polar bacterial flagellar motor of Helicobacter pylori. This microorganism displays high motility in the very viscous mucous layer of the stomach, which enables us to use H. pylori as a model system to study the polar motor specialised for locomotion in highly viscous fluids. The presented work will illustrate the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach combining biology and physics. The presentation will conclude with the discussion of the new paradigm for how the previously unseen accessory components control the function of the flagellar motor. [more]

Partners in slime: How mucus regulates microbial virulence

Microbiology Seminar Series

Mechanosensing in cell membranes

Special seminar

Microbial mediation of folivory

Special seminar

Salmonella diarrhea: mucus barriers, hydrogen-fueled growth and DNA transfer in the gut

Microbiology Seminar Series

Cryo-EM gets sweet: Molecular insight into glycosylation

Special seminar

Toward artificial cells: Engineering synthetic membranes, organelles, gene circuits and communication

Special seminar

High-throughput interaction profiling in bacteria

Microbiology Seminar Series

Viruses of Archaea: what we can learn from them

Special seminar

Symbioses as sources of evolutionary innovation in insects

Special seminar

Dissecting a Three-Protein Brain: The Chemsensory Array of E.

Special seminar

Cell-wall remodelling drives engulfment during sporulation in Bacillus subtilis

Microbiology Seminar Series

Chemotaxis towards autoinducer 2 mediates intra- and interspecies behaviors of Escherichia coli

Graduate Students Mini-Symposium

Droplet microfluidics for single microbial cell capture, isolation and cultivation

Special seminar

Robust Population control in Synthetic Communities

Graduate Students Mini-Symposium

Tool engineering for synthetic microbial consortia for metabolic engineering

Graduate Students Mini-Symposium

Towards biomimetic cell division: In vitro reconstitution of segregation

Graduate Students Mini-Symposium

Cell-states-dependent changes in cellular K+ determines protein activity in Escherichia coli

Graduate Students Mini-Symposium

Bacterial chemotaxis towards compounds in the gut

Graduate Students Mini-Symposium

Diversification of gene expression in Escherichia coli biofilms

Graduate Students Mini-Symposium

Effect of the environmental temperature on gene expression and motility system of E. coli¤

Graduate Students Mini-Symposium

Noise control in signaling pathways

Graduate Students Mini-Symposium

Deconstructing cell-size control into physiological modules in E. coli

Special seminar

Skin Microbial Endocrinology: When host neurohormones control bacterial homeostasis

The physical ecology of (marine) microbes

Mechanistic and evolutionary aspects of gene expression noise in yeast

From ancient lipids to synthetic life

The function of the cell membrane as a barrier and a matrix for biochemical activity relies on the properties imparted by lipids. In eukaryotes, sterols are crucial for modulating the molecular order of membranes. Sterol ordering provides the basis for membrane lateral segregation and promotes a fluid, mechanically robust plasma membrane. How do organisms that lack sterols determine membrane order? Hopanoids are ancient bacterial membrane lipids that have been proposed as putative sterol surrogates. We now explore the role of hopanoids, their effect on membranes in Methylobacterium extorquens and reflect on the path to building functional synthetic membranes. [more]
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