Speaker
Description
Fatty acids determine structural flexibility and thickness of membrane phospholipids, and changes in their composition necessarily affect cell function. While fatty acid composition would expectedly be strictly controlled, it is not: various cells incorporate environmental fatty acids directly into phospholipids, such that they ‘lose control’ of their membrane lipid composition. We are exploring the limits of membrane phospholipid distortion tolerated by a live bacterium, using Staphylococcus aureus as the model. An S. aureus fatty acid auxotroph was constructed in which the phospholipid fatty acid composition is fully controlled by the experimenter. This system allows us to introduce extreme variations in fatty acid composition, and identify how they affect growth, cell division, and antibiotic tolerance. The findings I will present are relevant to S. aureus behavior in the diverse lipid environments encountered during infection.
