Bacterial cell division

How does one cell become two? Cell division is a fundamental feature of any life. In bacteria, it is also of substantial biomedical importance as the target of many of our most sucessful antibiotics, such as the beta-lactams and the last-line-of-defence drug vancomycin.

We focus in particular on two related questions: how does the divisome, the protein complex responsible for dividing the bacterial cell, work as a nanoscale machine, and how do multiple nanoscale divisomes work together and coordinate to divide a micron sized cell?

We primarily use Bacillus subtilis as a model organism for this project, with a little bit of work in Escherichia coli.

People

• David Roberts, PDRA, bacterial geneticist and microscopist.
• Bhupinder Singh, Senior Research Technician, bacterial geneticist.
• We are in the procees of recruiting a post-doc in biophysics and super-resolution microscopy on this project.

Collaborators

• Jan Löwe lab
• Anđela Šarić lab