Julie Biteen, University of Michigan

Host: Ruobo Zhou (865-5610)

"Determining the nature of interactions and biomolecular condensates in microbes"

Abstract:

Single-molecule microscopy accesses nanometer-scale information with a benchtop microscope, providing a platform to super-resolve fluorescence emission, position, and dynamics, even in living cells. The Biteen Lab is developing new single-molecule methods to answer fundamental, unanswered questions in microbiology with applications including elucidating cell regulation and mis-regulation, understanding epigenetic inheritance, and visualizing nutrient utilization in the microbiome. These direct, quantitative, and high-resolution approaches have consequences in understanding subcellular biochemistry and biophysics. I will focus on our recently developed approaches to quantifying how cellular components interact and organize in microbiology. On one hand, we are evaluating the millisecond- and nanometer-scale dynamics of specific partners, and I will present as an example how HP1 proteins specifically and selectively associate with heterochromatin to silence gene expression in fission yeast. On the other hand, we are developing a generalizable, accessible, and rigorous framework to probe the nature of biomolecular condensates on the sub-micron scale in bacterial cells, and I will show how we probed the formation, reversibility, protein dynamics, and material state of biomolecular condensates in Escherichia coli to achieve a general model of bacterial cell organization.