IBL Spotlight - Akos Kovács and Patrick van Hage
- Date
- Wednesday 11 December 2024
- Time
- Location
- Sylvius Building
- Room
- Room 1.4.35
Ákos Kovács
Bacterial adaptation to a fungus
Bacterial-fungal interactions influence microbial community performance of most ecosystems and elicit specific microbial behaviors, including stimulation of specialized metabolite production. In my talk, I will explain a co-culture experimental evolution approach established to investigate adaptation of the soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis to the presence of the black mold fungus Aspergillus niger. Our results indicate that the presence of the fungus selects for increased surfactin production in B. subtilis, which inhibits fungal growth and metabolism, and facilitates the competitive success of the bacterium.
Patrick Hage
Unraveling autophagic resistance against intracellular infection via APEX2 proximity proteomics
Autophagy has been established as an important host defense mechanism against intracellular invasion of pathogens, such as Mycobacterium and Salmonella. During autophagy, these cellular invaders, just like misfolded proteins or defective organelles, are captured by a double-membrane vesicle and transported to the lysosome for degradation. In our group, we have discovered a key host resistance factor known as DNA-damage autophagy modulator 1 (DRAM1), which promotes antibacterial autophagy in mammalian cells and zebrafish.
To understand the underlying mechanism behind its host-protective function, we set out to identify the DRAM1 interactome. To this end, we employed APEX2-mediated proximity profiling. This method has allowed us to efficiently isolate and identify proteins that interact during antibacterial autophagy, either directly or indirectly, with DRAM1 or with LC3, a core autophagy protein. The identified proteins were subjected to differential proteomic analysis and linked with each other in functional protein networks. As a result, we identified a network of DRAM1 proximity partners involved in autophagosome-lysosome fusion. In addition, we are able to reveal our insights into shared or pathogen-specific responses during infection with Mycobacterium or Salmonella.