This announcement/request is sent at the request of Dr. Gemma Reguera by Helen Geiger.

Dr. Yuri Gorby, from the University of Southern California is the Science at the Edge speaker on Friday, September 16. He will be giving his seminar at 11:30AM in the BPS building, room 1400. His seminar is entitled: 'Bacterial nanowires and extracellular electron transfer'. Yuri is one of the pioneers of studies of electron transport to metals by bacteria and the environmental processes mediated by these organisms. These processes can be harnessed for the environmental restoration of sites contaminated with toxic metals and radionuclides and for electricity production in microbial fuel cells. In 1992 he published a seminal paper that reported the ability of some bacteria to reductively precipitate uranium from the contaminated groundwater. This paper was visionary in the sense that identified mechanistic ideas of the process that we are just now starting to understand. This work also helped build a solid program at DOE for the bioremediation of sites contaminated with radionuclides, legacy of the Cold War era. Yuri also was first to propose that nanowire-like appendages could connect cells in the sediments and function as an electronic grid that couples spatially separated chemical reactions in the environment. He demonstrated that bacteria in the genus Shewanella do in fact produce nanowires, whose conductivity is mediated by cytochromes that align on to a filamentous scaffold. His lates paper reporting that the axial conductivity of these structures is attached.

I am organizing Yuri's schedule for Friday. If you are interested in meeting with him on Friday afternoon, please contact me with your availability.

Best regards,

Gemma