Publications associées à Natural competence for transformation

Deciphering the nature of cell state transitions in single cells using quantitative modeling of temporal dynamics

Cells are the smallest operational units of living systems. Through synthesis of various biomolecules and exchange of signals with the environment, cells tightly regulate their composition to realize a specific functional state. The transformation of a cel ...

EPFL2024

DNA modifications impact natural transformation of Acinetobacter baumannii

Christian Iseli, Nicolas Jean Philippe Guex, Melanie Blokesch, Nina Vesel, Alexandre Lemopoulos

Acinetobacter baumannii is a dangerous nosocomial pathogen, especially due to its ability to rapidly acquire new genetic traits, including antibiotic resistance genes (ARG). In A. baumannii, natural competence for transformation, one of the primary modes o ...

2023

Engineered substrates incapable of induction of chondrogenic differentiation compared to the chondrocyte imprinted substrates

Philippe Renaud, Shahin Bonakdar, Leila Montazeri, Zahrasadat Ghazali

It is well established that surface topography can affect cell functions. However, finding a reproducible and reliable method for regulating stem cell behavior is still under investigation. It has been shown that cell imprinted substrates contain micro- an ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2023

Engineering Innate and Adaptive Immunity for Enhanced Cancer Immunotherapy

Min Gao

Cancer immunotherapy has become an attractive strategy among different therapeutic modalities over the past few years and has showed great success in the clinic. However, there are many outstanding challenges hindering the current immunotherapies. In my Ph ...

EPFL2023

Material Substrate Physical Properties Control Pseudomonas aeruginosa Biofilm Architecture

Alice Cont, Alexandre Louis André Persat

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

Biotechnological Frontiers of DNA Nanomaterials Continue to Expand: Bacterial Infection using Virus-Inspired Capsids

Maartje Martina Cornelia Bastings

The elegant geometry of viruses has inspired bio-engineers to synthetically explore the self-assembly of polyhedral capsids employed to protect new cargo or change an enzymatic microenvironment. Recently, Yang and co-workers used DNA nanotechnology to revi ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH2023

Deciphering the molecular events leading to the global restoration of the chromatin landscape during mitotic exit

Silja Michelle Placzek

Two fundamental properties of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are their ability to self-renew and differentiate into all somatic cell types. Maintenance of their identity faces major challenges when transitioning through mitosis, as most DNA-binding proteins a ...

EPFL2023

Countering T cell exhaustion and senescence for enhanced adoptive T cell therapies against solid tumors

Yang Zhao

CAR-T cell therapy has shown remarkable success in treating hematopoietic malignancies, but its efficacy in solid tumors is limited by T cell dysfunction, including exhaustion and senescence. In this study, we designed metabolically armored CAR-T cells to ...

EPFL2023

Natural competence of the pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii: an elusive phenomenon

Nina Vesel

Natural competence for transformation is an important driver of horizontal DNA exchange between different organisms. This can result in accumulation of dangerous genetic features, such as antibiotic resistance genes, in a single organism. One example of an ...

EPFL2022

Engineering Agrobacterium tumefaciens Adhesion to Target Cells

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

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

Engineering synthetic adhesins for biophysical investigation and rewiring of host-microbe interactions

Xavier Jean-Yves Pierrat

Host attachment is often a critical step in the onset of pathogenesis. To attach to host cells, bacteria have evolved a range of adhesins that bind to specific receptors. Some of these adhesins have been thoroughly characterized using biochemical technique ...

EPFL2022

Two defence systems eliminate plasmids from seventh pandemic Vibrio cholerae

Melanie Blokesch, David William Adams, Milena Jadwiga Jaskolska

Horizontal gene transfer can trigger rapid shifts in bacterial evolution. Driven by a variety of mobile genetic elements—in particular bacteriophages and plasmids—the ability to share genes within and across species underpins the exceptional adaptability o ...

2022

Engineering of chitosan-based derivatives for non-viral gene delivery

Laura Camille Louise Nicolle

Gene therapy offers the possibility to treat or even cure diseases originating from genetic defects by introducing a therapeutic gene in target cells or correcting the initial defective gene. Amongst different options, non-viral vectors rely on the deliver ...

EPFL2022

Microfluidic T Cell Selection by Cellular Avidity

Armand Kurum, Li Tang, Alexandre Harari

No T cell receptor (TCR) T cell therapies have obtained clinical approval. The lack of strategies capable of selecting and recovering potent T cell candidates may be a contributor to this. Existing protocols for selecting TCR T cell clones for cell therapi ...

WILEY2022

Pilus production in Acinetobacter baumannii is growth phase dependent and essential for natural transformation

Melanie Blokesch, Nina Vesel

Acinetobacter baumannii is a severe threat to human health as a frequently multidrug-resistant hospital-acquired pathogen. Part of the danger from this bacterium comes from its genome plasticity and ability to evolve quickly by taking up and recombining ex ...

American Society for Microbiology2021

A ribonucleoprotein transfection strategy for CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing and single cell cloning in rainbow trout cells

Kristin Schirmer

Background The advent of the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/Cas9 technology marked the beginning of a new era in the field of molecular biology, allowing the efficient and precise creation of targeted mutations in the ge ...

2021

Coordination between cell growth, division and chromosome replication cycles in mycobacteria

Gaëlle Madeleine Vuaridel

Propagation of microorganisms is based on three fundamental processes: cell growth, DNA replication, and cell division. Although important for antibacterial drug development, these processes are poorly understood in Actinobacteria, a medically important ph ...

EPFL2021

Microtissue models for studying the dynamics of host-pathogen interactions in the urinary bladder

Kunal Sharma

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are amongst the most common bacterial infections and are the second-most frequent reason for antibiotic prescriptions. Moreover, in about 25% of all treated cases, recurrence of infection occurs. Uropathogenic Escherichia co ...

EPFL2021

Traceable Impedance-Based Dispensing and Cloning of Living Single Cells

Philippe Renaud, Yann Barrandon, Stéphanie Claudinot, Ariane Rochat, David Vincent Bonzon, Georges Muller

Single-cell cloning is essential in stem cell biology, cancer research, and biotechnology. Regulatory agencies now require an indisputable proof of clonality that current technologies do not readily provide. Here, we report a one-step cloning method using ...

2020

Structure and Function of the T4 Spackle Protein Gp61.3

Petr Leiman, Alec Fraser

The bacteriophage T4 genome contains two genes that code for proteins with lysozyme activity-e and 5. Gene e encodes the well-known T4 lysozyme (commonly called T4L) that functions to break the peptidoglycan layer late in the infection cycle, which is requ ...

2020