Event Date: 25-05-2022, 17:00
Mechanical forces govern interactions of host cells with bacterial pathogens along multiple scales
SEMINARS
| Ομιλήτρια: | Dr. Effie Bastounis |
| Θέμα: | Mechanical forces govern interactions of host cells with bacterial pathogens along multiple scales
Οι μηχανικές δυνάμεις διέπουν τις αλληλεπιδράσεις των κυττάρων-ξενιστών με παθογόνα βακτήρια σε πολλαπλές κλίμακες |
| Περίληψη: | Bacterial pathogens lead to devastating mortality and morbidity worldwide and this is aggravated by the increasing threat of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. To combat infectious diseases, it is important to understand how host cells interact with bacterial pathogens. Signals conveyed from pathogen to host, and vice versa, may be chemical and mechanical. While the chemical and molecular basis of host-pathogen interactions has been extensively explored, relatively less is known about mechanical signals and responses in the context of those interactions. Nevertheless, a wide variety of bacterial pathogens appear to have developed mechanisms to alter the cellular biomechanics of their hosts in order to promote their survival and dissemination, and in turn many host responses to infection rely on mechanical alterations in human host cells and tissues to limit the spread of infection. In this talk I will present our recent findings on how mechanical forces generated by host cells can promote or obstruct the dissemination of intracellular bacterial pathogens. In addition, I will discuss how in vivo extracellular mechanical signals influence interactions between host cells and intracellular bacterial pathogens. All throughout, I will highlight bioengineering-inspired tools and techniques that can be used to measure host cell mechanics during infection. The findings I will present underline the importance of interrogating both mechanical and chemical signals while studying host-pathogen interactions and suggest that such approaches can both reveal novel virulence mechanisms and also provide new insight into host cell and tissue mechanobiology. |
| Σύντομο βιογραφικό: | Dr. Effie Bastounis is a Junior Group Leader in the Interfaculty institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine at the University of Tubingen, Germany and a member of the Cluster of Excellence “Controlling Microbes to Fight Infections” (EXC2124). Dr. Bastounis grew up in Athens, Greece and earned her B.S./M.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 2007. She pursued her M.Sc./Ph.D. in Bioengineering at UC San Diego making seminal contributions in the cell motility field by shedding light into mechanics that power cell migration. She then joined the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University School of Medicine, to study how mechanical forces dictate the interactions of human cells with bacterial pathogens as an American Heart Association (AHA) postdoctoral fellow. In 2018 she moved as faculty to the Biology Department at the University of Washington where she continued developing rigorous and reproducible culture-based methods to investigate hostpathogen interactions, drawing on biophysical, cell biological and computational approaches.
Among others, she was awarded the three-year AHA Career Development Award and the Lyme Disease Association grant award. The work in the Bastounis lab currently focuses on single and collective cell biomechanics and on host-pathogen interactions, integrating engineering, microscopy and cell biology approaches to understand basic cell mechanobiology and pathogenesis of bacterial infections. |
| Ημερομηνία: | Τετάρτη, 25 Μαΐου 2022 |
| Ώρα: | 17:00 |
| Link: | Για το σύνδεσμο της τηλεδιάσκεψης πατήστε εδώ |
Organizer
FORTH/ICE-HT
Stadiou Str., Platani
www.iceht.forth.gr
Event starts: 25-05-2022, 17:00