Noyce Conference Room
Seminar
  US Mountain Time
Speaker: 
Karine A. Gibbs

Our campus is closed to the public for this event.

Abstract: Collective behaviors, like those of ants, birds, and bacteria, inspire us with the promise of more immense achievements with fewer resources, and understanding these behaviors is vital in comprehending the world around us. Further, bacterial communities are dynamic societies where microbes communicate cooperatively and antagonistically with siblings and non-siblings. Individual bacteria must navigate the complexities of these interactions even as the whole population expands. In this seminar, I will discuss how bacteria use a local sense of identity to assemble and move as a community. Our model organism, Proteus mirabilis, lives in human and animal intestines and the environment and can cause disease after moving to the bladder. Individual cells move on the scale of micrometers per second; populations swarm on the order of millimeters per hour. Our data shows how P. mirabilis communicates identity between cells and how this identity-based signaling regulates cell development and population-wide swarming. Our research addresses how an organism's identity, communication, and local environment influence collective behaviors. 

Speaker

Karine GibbsKarine A. GibbsAssociate Professor, Plant & Microbial Biology UC, Berkeley
SFI Host: 
Liz Bradley

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