Molecular Horizons Seminar - Professor Julie Biteen (University of Michigan)

Single-molecule microscopy accesses nanometer-scale information with a benchtop microscope, providing a platform to super-resolve fluorescence emission, position, and dynamics, even in living cells. The Biteen Lab is developing new single-molecule methods to answer fundamental, unanswered questions in microbiology with applications including elucidating cell regulation and mis-regulation, understanding epigenetic inheritance, and visualising nutrient utilisation in the microbiome. These direct, quantitative, and high-resolution approaches have consequences in understanding subcellular biochemistry and biophysics. I will focus in particular on our recently developed approach to quantifying how cellular components interact and organise in microbiology. Overall, this framework provides a generalisable, accessible, and rigorous set of experiments to probe the nature of biomolecular condensates on the sub-micron scale in bacterial cells. By probing the formation, reversibility, protein dynamics, and material state of biomolecular condensates, we are achieving a general model of bacterial cell organisation.