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.

EXTRAMURAL

Dr. Christopher Marx, Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho

Bacterial epigenetic memory of stress response

Faced with a lethal stress, microbial populations must either evolve genetic resistance or die, right? For Methylobacterium extorquens, lethal levels of the toxic metabolic intermediate formaldehyde can select for mutants beneficial in this environment, but we have also found that they can survive via epigenetic inheritance. This occurs at much higher rates and can be passed on many generations later. Over the course of trying to use long-read sequencing to identify if alternative DNA methylation patterns were the cause of memory, we fortuitously discovered two new phenomena. Our bacterium uses multiple replication origins, and different stresses leave a remarkable signature in the chromosome-wide pattern of DNA methylation.