Speaker
Fionna Samuels
Speaker's Institution
Colorado State University
Date
20181107
Time
4:00 pm
Location
Chemistry A101
Mixer Time
3:45 pm
Mixer Time
Chemistry B101E
Calendar (ICS) Event
Additional Information

Literature Seminar Abstract

Antibiotic resistance is a critical problem facing society.1 Ribosomal targeting is a well-established pathway for developing antibiotics and understanding how physiological ribosomes change conformation as antibiotics bind is crucial to developing new antibiotics.1 Though ribosomal conformation has been studies in vitro, few in vivo studies have been accomplished.1 Recently, Balzarotti et al developed a new super-resolution fluorescence imaging technique they call MINFLUX due to the minimal photon counts needed to generated nanometer resolved images.2,3 Built on the principles of STED and PALM/STORM, MINFLUX localizes photon emitters by probing local intensity minima and can be used to image and track fluorescently labelled macromolecules in living cells.2,3 Though it has yet to be used to study conformational changes of ribosomes, MINFLUX presents an opportunity to investigate in vivo ribosomal conformational changes and track ribosomes as they diffuse through living cells, providing information that can be used to develop better antibiotics in the face of antibiotic resistance.

Citations:

 [1] Wilson, D.N., Ribosome-targeting antibiotics and mechanism of bacterial resistance, Nat. Rev. Microbiol.,  12, 35–48 (2014) [2] Balzarotti, F., Eilers, Y., Gwosch, K.C., Gynna, A.H., Westphal, V., Stefani, F.D., Elf, J., Hell, S.W., Nanometer resolution imagind and tracking of fluorescent molecules with minimal photon fluxes, Science, 355 606-612 (2017) [3] Eilers, Y., Haisen, T., Gwosch, K.C., Balzarotti, F., Hell, S.W., MINFLUX monitors rapid molecular jumps with superior spatiotemporal resolution, PNAS, 115, 6117-6122 (2018)

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