When:
Friday, October 28, 2022
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM CT
Where: Robert H Lurie Medical Research Center, Baldwin Auditorium, 303 E. Superior, Chicago, IL 60611 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Cynthia Naugles
(312) 503-0489
Group: Department of Microbiology-Immunology Seminars/Events
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Title:
Role of Mobile Genes in the Community Interactions of the Intestinal Microbiota
Speaker:
Leonor Garcia-Bayona, PhD, University of Chicago, Postdoctoral Scholar
Topic:
The intestinal microbiota plays a major role in human health and is therefore the focus of significant interest as a target for therapeutic interventions. Our gut microbial community is quickly evolving with us, even on the timescale of a human lifetime, following changes in modern lifestyles, especially in industrialized countries. I aim to understand how horizontal gene transfer shapes interactions in the microbiota and what the implications of this widespread phenomenon are for community properties relevant to human health (for example, resilience of a healthy microbiota to perturbations). I recently identified a biofilm-formation encoding plasmid that frequently spreads across multiple Bacteroidales species. This plasmid is also exceptional because of its high frequency of intrapersonal transfer, recent spread, and its ubiquity across global human populations. I’m using a combination of genetics, microscopy and population-level analyses to explore the individual and community phenotypes mediated by this plasmid in vitro and in gnotobiotic mouse models.
Host:
M.-N. Frances Yap, PhD
Associate Professor
Bacteriology Faculty Search Committee
Dept. of Microbiology-Immunology
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Chicago, IL