Advances in Immunology and Microbiology Seminar Series
About the event
Featuring research in the areas of:
Epidemiology | Infectious Disease | Disease Ecology | Drug Discovery | Virology |
Global Health | Vector-Borne Disease | Pathology
The Advances in Immunology & Microbiology seminar series is a weekly forum that brings together scientists from diverse fields and disciplines across the College of Veterinary Medicine to discuss research advances in the broad areas of immunology, microbiology, infectious diseases, and global health. Seminars feature student speakers from the Immunology & Infectious Disease (IID) doctoral program, IID-affiliated postdoctoral researchers and faculty, intramural speakers from across the university, and extramural speakers.
PRESENTER: Dr. Phil Adams, Stadtman Investigator; Chief, Biology of Spirochetes Unit (BOSU); Laboratory of Bacteriology (LB); National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); National Institutes of Health (NIH)
TITLE: Dissecting B. burgdorferi Gene Regulation: Single-Cell Approaches and Regulatory RNA Networks
Abstract
The Lyme disease spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi exists in an enzootic cycle between Ixodes scapularis ticks and mammals. B. burgdorferi, consequently, must harbor robust gene regulatory mechanisms to effectively colonize hosts of varied types with different temperatures, immune responses and sources of metabolites. In bacteria, a major class of post-transcriptional regulators are trans-encoded small RNAs (sRNAs). To globally predict B. burgdorferi sRNA regulatory networks, we utilized the Hi-GRIL-seq workflow, in which proximal RNAs are ligated in the bacterium and sequenced, resulting in hundreds of potential sRNA-target pairs. Mapping these sRNA-RNA interactions across growth revealed an extensive network of sRNAs that base pair with different RNA targets depending on growth phase. Additionally, we were interested in understanding cell-to-cell differences in gene expression. Therefore, we designed a workflow to isolate single bacteria by fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) followed by single-cell RNA-seq. Collectively, these experiments uncovered new gene regulators and abundant transcriptional heterogeneity in the Lyme disease pathogen.