Friday, April 18

11:30 am

Room 1400 BPS

Professor Lynette Cegelski

Department of Chemistry

Stanford University

Structure, Function, and Inhibition of Bacterial Biofilms:

Lessons from Small Molecules and a Big Magnet

Bacterial biofilms are complex multicellular assemblies that exhibit resistance to antibiotics and contribute to the pathogenesis of serious and chronic infectious diseases. As insoluble and non-crystalline materials, biofilms pose a challenge to analysis by conventional methods.  We are working to transform vague biofilm descriptors from terms like slime and glue into quantitative parameters of chemical and molecular composition. We recently developed an approach that integrates non-perturbative preparation of the extracellular matrix with electron microscopy, biochemistry and solid-state NMR spectroscopy to define the chemical composition of the intact and insoluble extracellular matrix of a clinically important pathogenic bacterium—uropathogenic E. coli. Our data permitted a sum-of-all-the-parts analysis. In our chemical biology efforts, we have also discovered small-molecule biofilm inhibitors of E. coli biofilms and examined their influence on biofilm composition and architecture.  I will discuss these results and our emerging discoveries in biofilms formed by the human pathogen Vibrio cholerae.