Speaker
Kevin Broux
(KU Leuven)
Description
Generalized transduction has been intensively studied for its driving role in bacterial evolution and the spread of antibiotic resistance. Studying P22 packaging preferences with genetics and sequencing allowed us to genetically engineer a P22-based transduction platform that enables live scrutiny of transduction events at single-cell resolution with time-lapse fluorescence microscopy. This not only allowed us to compare successful and failed/aborted transduction events, but also to study some of the early-discovered transduction-affected P22 mutants. In fact, synthetic reconstruction of such spontaneous mutants lead to new insights into the role of P22 ejection proteins.
