Description:

Title: How Single Cells Make Decisions During Infection: Lessons from Innate Immune Signaling

Speaker: Keara Lane, PhD / Northwestern University

Host: Nicholas Cianciotto, PhD

Topic:

Bacterial infections are dynamic and heterogeneous, yet the bulk of our understanding of infectious disease has come from static, population-level measurements. What if we could just watch host and pathogen responses in individual cells as an infection progresses – what would we learn about infection? The Lane lab is focused on developing tools and approaches to explore the time dimension, or dynamics, of bacterial infection in individual cells. The lab uses live-cell imaging to determine how decisions made in individual host and bacterial cells influence infection outcome, with a view to identifying novel strategies to engineer cellular behavior to control infection outcome.