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Welcome to our laboratory!
Welcome to our laboratory!
In our lab we study the inner secrets of bacteria. Bacteria, unlike humans, are prokaryotes, which means they are single-celled lifeforms and they lack organelles like a nucleus. It isn't easy, bacteria are very small (1 thousandth of a needle head), and the molecules inside them are even smaller.
But we have a few tricks we can use. The purpose of this website is to describe both the questions we are asking about how bacteria adapt to their environment as well as the ways we go about answering these questions.
We will show you how we study bacteria at different scales, from the growth of a whole population of millions of cells, to the activity of a single gene in a single cell, to the interactions between specific proteins and DNA. On the right you can see for example a movie of a growing bacterial colony taken with a microscope (thanks Avelino!). More about this experiment in this page!
Our work is interdisciplinary, so it requires the expertise of biologists, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, but we are also adapting to include the humanities in our lab. We had a student of philosophy study the philosophic implications behind the research in our lab, and we are branching out to see how other disciplines can help us connect to society. There is more about our broader impacts in this page. We will try to describe how this intercultural mix gets along, with their different traditions, languages and priorities and how these differences can help us to better define what we are observing. In addition some of our nonscientific friends will also contribute with illustrations and questions.
Feel free to ask questions in the comments section below each page or email me at: bianca DOT ourbacteria AT gmail DOT com.
Also suggestions for improvement are always welcome.
Enjoy!
Bianca
The kind of experiments we do either measure directly the properties of living bacteria (in vivo experiments) or measure the properties of purified molecules such as the complexes formed between proteins and DNA (in vitro experiments).
Once we have purified the protein and DNA that interest us we can study the formation of the interactions between them. This will help us find out which part, or sequence, of the DNA is recognized by a protein and how environmental variables such as temperature can affect this interaction.
In live bacteria we can measure the amount of gene expression, how fast and when a given protein is produced.
To do this we use a fluorescent protein, GFP, that is produced by the bacterium. In the picture on the right you can see a photo of a petri dish with bacterial colonies on it. Some of the colonies contain bacteria with a bit of fluorescent protein, some with a lot more, you can measure the fluorescence by exposing the bacteria to blue light.
We can do this kind of measurement in a whole population of bacteria, or one bacterium at a time (an example in this movie).
In our laboratory we do experiments, but we also work with physicists and mathematicians who make models, or theoretical experiments (in silico experiments).
What are bacteria ? Are they all dangerous for our health ? How do they live inside our body and adapt to different growth conditions?
Bacteria may be very small, 100 to 1000 times smaller than one of our cells, but they have evolved to grow in many different environments, from the frozen lakes of Siberia, to the heat vents of the Atacama desert, to the depths of the ocean and even to the warm and cozy environment of our belly ! This is because they have evolved mechanisms that allow them to rapidly adapt to external conditions.
Think of the bacteria that live in our gut for example. They spend half of their lives in the outside world, in the cold and nutrient poor environment, and half of their lives in the rich, warm, diverse bacterial community that is our intestine. This is true for both beneficial and pathogenic bacteria.
This adaptation takes place thanks to the fact that cells can change the kind of proteins that they produce in response to external stimuli. This is true for all kinds of cells, bacterial cells, plant cells and animal cells.
We try to better understand how bacteria adapt to different growth conditions by studying the molecular interactions that can control the kind of proteins produced by the cell. You can find out more about this in the Gene Expression page.
These molecular interactions take place mainly between proteins and DNA and between different proteins.
As researchers we often get the question of whether we have found what we are looking for. Well, sometimes we do, sometimes we even find something different, which makes it even more interesting. In the page "Recent Results" you can see a description of the exciting new information we have found about gene regulation in bacteria.
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