Publications by Alexandre Louis André Persat

Related publications (26)

Engineering Agrobacterium tumefaciens Adhesion to Target Cells

Alix Kim Lan Pham, Alexandre Louis André Persat, Xavier Jean-Yves Pierrat, Zaïnebe Dhirani, Jeremy Pak Hei Wong

Agrobacterium tumefaciens is a plant pathogen commonly repurposed for genetic modification of crops. Despite its versatility, it remains inefficient at transferring DNA to many hosts, including to animal cells. Like many pathogens, physical contact between ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2022

Biofilm formation on human immune cells is a multicellular predation strategy of Vibrio cholerae

Sofya Mikhaleva, Alexandre Louis André Persat

Biofilm formation is generally recognized as a bacterial defense mechanism against environmental threats, including antibiotics, bacteriophages, and leukocytes of the human immune system. Here, we show that for the human pathogen Vibrio cholerae, biofilm f ...

CELL PRESS2023

KRAB zinc finger protein ZNF676 controls the transcriptional influence of LTR12-related endogenous retrovirus sequences

Didier Trono, Priscilla Turelli, Alexandre Louis André Persat, Julien Léonard Duc, Alexandre Coudray, Michaël Imbeault, Tamara Rossy, Delphine Yvette L Grun, Alexandra Iouranova, Jonas Caspar De Tribolet-Hardy

Background Transposable element-embedded regulatory sequences (TEeRS) and their KRAB-containing zinc finger protein (KZFP) controllers are increasingly recognized as modulators of gene expression. We aim to characterize the contribution of this system to g ...

2022

Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron metabolic activity decreases with polysaccharide molecular weight

Noémie Chillier, Tom Ian Battin, Alexandre Louis André Persat, Jeremy Pak Hei Wong

The human colon hosts hundreds of commensal bacterial species, many of which ferment complex dietary carbohydrates. To transform these fibers into metabolically accessible compounds, microbes often express a series of dedicated enzymes homologous to the st ...

Amer Soc Microbiology2024

Pseudomonas aeruginosa type IV pili actively induce mucus contraction to form biofilms in tissue-engineered human airways

Bart Deplancke, Alexandre Louis André Persat, Lorenzo Anton-Louis Talà, Jörn Pezoldt, Tamara Rossy, Lucas Andrade Meirelles, Tania Distler

The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes antibiotic-recalcitrant pneumonia by forming biofilms in the respiratory tract. Despite extensive in vitro experimentation, how P. aeruginosa forms biofilms at the airway mucosa is unresolved. To inv ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2023

Biofilms deform soft surfaces and disrupt epithelia

Alexandre Louis André Persat, Tamara Rossy, Alice Cont, Zaïnebe Dhirani

During chronic infections and in microbiota, bacteria predominantly colonize their hosts as multicellular structures called biofilms. A common assumption is that biofilms exclusively interact with their hosts biochemically. However, the contributions of me ...

2020

Roadmap on emerging concepts in the physical biology of bacterial biofilms: from surface sensing to community formation

Alexandre Louis André Persat, Marco Julian Kühn

Bacterial biofilms are communities of bacteria that exist as aggregates that can adhere to surfaces or be free-standing. This complex, social mode of cellular organization is fundamental to the physiology of microbes and often exhibits surprising behavior. ...

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2021

Two antagonistic response regulators control Pseudomonas aeruginosa polarization during mechanotaxis

Alexandre Louis André Persat, Lorenzo Anton-Louis Talà, Xavier Jean-Yves Pierrat, Zaïnebe Dhirani, Marco Julian Kühn

The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa adapts to solid surfaces to enhance virulence and infect its host. Type IV pili (T4P), long and thin filaments that power surface-specific twitching motility, allow single cells to sense surfaces and contro ...

WILEY2023

Antagonistic response regulators spatially regulate receptor methylation in the Pseudomonas aeruginosa Pil-Chp surface sensing system

Alexandre Louis André Persat, Marco Julian Kühn

Most bacterial chemosensory systems encode enzymes that are predicted to methylate and demethylate their chemoreceptors to control signaling activity. Here, we show that a predicted methyltransferase (PilK) and methylesterase (ChpB) methylate and demethyla ...

2025

Vibrio cholerae filamentation promotes chitin surface attachment at the expense of competition in biofilms

Alexandre Louis André Persat

Collective behavior in spatially structured groups, or biofilms, is the norm among microbes in their natural environments. Though biofilm formation has been studied for decades, tracing the mechanistic and ecological links between individual cell morpholog ...

National Academy of Sciences2019

Time-Resolved Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy for Three-Dimensional Tracking of Nanoscale Cell Surface Dynamics

Aleksandra Radenovic, Georg Fantner, Daniel Constam, Alexandre Louis André Persat, Adrian Pascal Nievergelt, Vytautas Navikas, Xavier Jean-Yves Pierrat, Samuel Mendes Leitão, Katarina Pinjusic, Barney Frederick Drake, Charlène Cécile Geneviève Brillard

Nanocharacterization plays a vital role in understanding the complex nanoscale organization of cells and organelles. Understanding cellular function requires high-resolution information about how the cellular structures evolve over time. A number of techni ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2021

The wall-less bacterium Spiroplasma poulsonii builds a polymeric cytoskeleton composed of interacting MreB isoforms

Bruno Lemaitre, Alexandre Louis André Persat, Florent François Masson, Xavier Jean-Yves Pierrat

A rigid cell wall defines the morphology of most bacteria. MreB, a bacterial homologue of actin, plays a major role in coordinating cell wall biogenesis and defining cell shape. Spiroplasma are wall-less bacteria that robustly grow with a characteristic he ...

CELL PRESS2021

Mechanomicrobiology: how bacteria sense and respond to forces

Alexandre Louis André Persat

Microbiology and biophysics are converging to advance our understanding of the mechanobiology of microorganisms. In this Review, Dufrene and Persat discuss the physical forces that bacteria experience in their natural environments and the structures that t ...

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP2020

Material Substrate Physical Properties Control Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilm Architecture

Alexandre Louis André Persat, Alice Cont

The biofilm lifestyle is the most widespread survival strategy in the bacterial world. Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms cause chronic infections and are highly recalcitrant to antimicrobials. The genetic requirements allowing P. aeruginosa to grow into biof ...

AMER SOC MICROBIOLOGY2023

The Mammalian Membrane Microenvironment Regulates the Sequential Attachment of Bacteria to Host Cells

Alexandre Louis André Persat, Xavier Jean-Yves Pierrat, Zaïnebe Dhirani, Jeremy Pak Hei Wong

Pathogen attachment to host tissue is critical in the progress of many infections. Bacteria use adhesion in vivo to stabilize colonization and subsequently regulate the deployment of contact-dependent virulence traits. To specifically target host cells, th ...

2021

Pseudomonas aeruginosa orchestrates twitching motility by sequential control of type IV pili movements

Alexandre Louis André Persat, Lorenzo Anton-Louis Talà

Prokaryotes have the ability to walk on surfaces using type IV pili (TFP), a motility mechanism known as twitching(1,2). Molecular motors drive TFP extension and retraction, but whether and how these movements are coordinated is unknown(3). Here, we reveal ...

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP2019

A scaffold protein connects type IV pili with the Chp chemosensory system to mediate activation of virulence signaling in Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Alexandre Louis André Persat

Type IV pili (TFP) function as mechanosensors to trigger acute virulence programs in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. On surface contact, TFP retraction activates the Chp chemosensory system phosphorelay to upregulate 3', 5'-cyclic monophosphate (cAMP) production a ...

Wiley-Blackwell2016

Archaeal type IV pili stabilize Haloferax volcanii biofilms in flow

Alexandre Louis André Persat, Lorenzo Anton-Louis Talà, Pascal Damian Odermatt

Multicellular communities of contiguous cells attached to solid surfaces called biofilms represent a common microbial strategy to improve resilience in adverse environments.1-3 While bacterial biofilms have been under intense investigation, whether archaea ...

Cell Press2023

Decoding host-microbe interactions with engineered human organoids

Alexandre Louis André Persat, Lucas Andrade Meirelles

As the antimicrobial resistance crisis becomes a reality, we are only now realizing we lack a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms by which major pathogens infect their human host. To address this, we must employ novel methodologies that allow us to ...

SPRINGERNATURE2025

Monodisperse Selectively Permeable Hydrogel Capsules Made from Single Emulsion Drops

Esther Amstad, Alexandre Louis André Persat, Huachuan Du, Mathias Steinacher, Alice Cont

Capsules are often used to protect chemical and biological entities from the environment, to control the timing and location of their release, or to facilitate the collection of waste. Their performance depends on the thickness and composition of their she ...

2021