Colloquium by Professor Victor SOURJIK (Max Planck Institute)

Bacterial motility is one of the quantitatively best-understood model systems in biology. Building on previous work in this area, we investigate how physics has shaped the evolution of bacterial movement and navigation in chemical gradients. Our results suggest that physical limitations on bacterial propulsion and fitness trade-offs between motility and growth can quantitatively explain the regulation of bacterial resource investment in motile behavior.

Understanding the physics of motility and chemotaxis is also important for engineering chemotactic bacterial microswimmers, which could serve as microscopic delivery vehicles for various biotherapeutic applications. We recently constructed such biohybrid microswimmers based on chromosome-less bacterial minicells. Despite their small size of only several hundred nanometers, these engineered minicells can be efficiently propelled by bacterial flagella and transport cargo in chemical gradients.

You may also like the following events from Department of Physics, CUHK 香港中文大學物理系:

• This Thursday, 20th November, 01:30 pm, Seminar by Dr. Qianhang DING (Institute for Basic Science) in Hong Kong