TIME TO SHARE - An Insight into Bacteria
We at Bruker JPK BioAFM are delighted to invite you to join us and a distinguished panel of experts to an international mini-symposium An Insight into Bacteria.
There is growing recognition that a multidisciplinary approach is crucial to unravelling the complex biomolecular mechanisms involved in the interactions between pathogens and host cells, and microbes and the cell membrane, and to understanding how these interactions influence the autophagic response.
Each of our speakers has an interdisciplinary background, and during this short symposium will provide exciting new insights into topics such as combining AFM with advanced genetic manipulation to investigate the nanomechanical properties of proteins at the single-cell and single-molecule level and protein involvement in microbial adhesion, mechanosensing and biofilm-associated infections. Other topics include the viscoelastic response of cells to mechanical stress during interactions with pathogens, and high-resolution AFM imaging of live bacteria, their cell envelopes and membrane proteins at molecular resolution, and even the perforation of the outer membrane by immune proteins.
Learn how Atomic Force Microscopy can provide new insights into your life science research!
Speakers
Prof. Frank Lafont
Prof. Frank Lafont was trained in medicine, biology, and management in Paris. He received his PhD in developmental neurobiology from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and did a postdoc in cell biology at the EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany. He lectured on cellular microbiology at the Biochemistry & Medical Center, University of Geneva, and collaborated on Biophysics at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland. Lafont is currently Director of Research at the Center of Infection and Immunity of Lille, Pasteur Institute Lille, and is head of the BioImaging Center Lille.
Dr. Marion Mathelié-Guinlet
Dr. Marion Mathelié-Guinlet received both her multidisciplinary engineering degree from Centrale Lyon, France, and her research master degree in astrophysics from the University of Manchester, UK, in 2014. She received her PhD in nanosciences at the University of Bordeaux (France) in 2017. Combining theoretical knowledge and experimental approaches, she has developed a strong expertise in the (bio-)physics and physico-chemistry of interfaces. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the UCLouvain, Belgium, in Yves Dufrêne’s group. She is interested in understanding the nanomechanics of proteins at the single-cell and single-molecule level and using atomic force microscopy, in the context of bacterial adhesion and mechanosensing.
Prof. Bart Hoogenboom
Prof. Bart Hoogenboom is a Professor of Biophysics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy (UCL) and the London Centre for Nanotechnology, where he is also lead scientist for its atomic force microscopy facilities. He was initially trained as a solid-state physicist, working on correlated-electron systems and scanning probe microscopy. After his PhD at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, he pioneered atomic-resolution AFM in solution and next gradually shifted his focus to nanoscale biological structures and processes. At UCL, this has led to the first visualisation of the DNA double helix and structural variations thereof in solution; the development of novel nanomechanical and computational approaches to understanding the physics of transport selectivity into and out of the cell nucleus via nuclear pore complexes; the understanding of membrane disruption by various natural and engineered antimicrobial peptides and by pore forming proteins employed both by bacteria and by the vertebrate immune system, which has in part involved high-resolution AFM imaging of live bacteria.