A new way to detect infection
Coloured electron microscopy image of a nascent plasma membrane ruffle enclosing a bacterium which invades an intestinal epithelial cell. Sample: Lalitha Tadala; Image acquisition: Ramón Cervantes-Rivera; Artistic rendering: Atin Sharma. MIMS, Umeå University.
Press release – 10 August 2022, Umeå, Sweden
A new way to detect infection
The immune system is under the constant challenge of specifically detecting dangerous microbes to remove them. Dr. Andrea Puhar and her team at The Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS) at Umeå University, discovered that gut cells sense harmful bacteria through the mechanical force exerted on their cell surface during bacterial invasion. A protein called PIEZO1, which is able to sense mechanical signals, is necessary to detect invading bacteria. Activation of PIEZO1 during infection triggers a protective immune response. The study is now published in the scientific journal Cell Reports.
I had a chat with Fabiola Puertolas Balint who is a doctoral student in Björn Schröder’s group. Her grandfather left Spain for Mexico during the Spanish civil war and stayed there to start a family. Fabiola left Mexico to come to Europe for her studies. Where will she settle? That is still a mystery.
s Normark, Professor and Head Physician at Karolinksa Institutet, member of the MIMS Executive Board, has been elected as the new President of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Kungliga vetenskapsakademien). She takes over this role from the current President, Professor Dan Larhammar, on July 1st.
Kai joined MIMS in August 2019 to start his PhD career in the lab of Jonas Barandun, who was a freshly recruited MIMS group leader that time. Kai moved to Umeå from Basel, Switzerland, to improve his cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) skills and to have an adventure abroad.
Felipe Cava, MIMS Senior Principal Investigator and Associate Professor at the Department of Molecular Biology at Umeå University, wants to understand the diversity of cell wall biology across species and how this knowledge can be used to fight emerging infectious diseases. His team is using cutting-edge methodology to understand the role of the cell wall in environmental adaptation and for finding potential targets for antimicrobial therapies. The Cava lab and their collaborators recently published two scientific articles in which they revealed groundbreaking discoveries about how the bacterial cell wall adapts to different conditions. The researchers involved in these studies have been able to, for the first time, analyze peptidoglycan, the main cell wall component, in deep details.
Sophie Tronnet was born and raised in France and after living in Germany for a short period of time during her PhD, she moved to Umeå to join MIMS in March 2017. Her passion: pastries and showing the magical world of science.
