This post is a little bit shorter because A) My family came to visit this weekend, and B) it’s hard to talk about other people’s research in great detail, especially when they themselves had to summarize their work into an 8 minute chalk talk. Also, thank you Joe, Kathy, Christin and Fabian for writing about my chalk talk, I’m glad you guys enjoyed it and I thought your talks were all really cool too!
Joe’s talk was really interesting to me. His research is focused on bacterial conjugation. Conjugation is a form of horizontal gene transfer, or the exchange of genetic material in a way other than reproduction. Conjugation is extremely important because it is the bacterial equivalent of reproduction.
The motivation for Joe’s research is that bacterial conjugation has been studied extensively in vitro, but conjugation in vivo is still uncharted territory. The in vivo research is valuable because it is the first step towards creating biotechnology that can help people.
Joe is using C. elegans as his model organism, He is studying how the rate of conjugation can be modified by various stimuli, such as antibiotic resistance. Joe uses a fluorescent plasmid construct to measure the rates of conjugation via flow cytometry in which the fluorescence indicates cell density. There are several advantages to using C. elegans for this experiment. They are big enough that they can be observed under a microscope. They are also transparent and their individual cells can be observed. Finally, Joe is able to grind up the worms and still measure bacterial conjugation, which is highly efficient.
I think Joe’s research is very significant because of how it can further advance the fields of synthetic biology and genetic engineering. In both of these areas of study, bacterial conjugation can be an unknown variable in experiments. By understanding bacterial conjugation, we can better understand the data from experiments involving plasmid vectors being introduced into bacteria. Good luck Joe!
This week’s science memes:
