Title: Exploring the ultrastructure of bacteria
Speaker: Ariane Briegel (IBL and NeCEN)

As of December 2015, Ariane has been appointed professor of “Ultrastructural Biology” in the Microbial Biotechnology & Health cluster at IBL. Her expertise is in using electron cryotomography to study how microbes sense and respond to their environment. She will continue her earlier work that she started at CalTech on chemoreceptor arrays at the IBL and will pursue a new line of research to understand bacterial ultrastructure in native environments. So far, studies of bacterial ultrastructure have largely been limited to bacterial cells grown in liquid monocultures. But an increasing number of studies demonstrate that bacteria undergo radical morphological changes depending on environmental conditions.