Join Professor Robert Endres for Science Breaks: How cells perceive their environment – lessons from bacteria which includes a Q&A session where he will answer your questions.
Join the event on Microsoft Teams
Abstract
Bacteria are able to sense nutrients in their environment and bias their movement towards these in a process called ‘chemotaxis’. Despite being considered relatively simple, the sensory system and signal transduction pathway show remarkable engineering properties such as high sensitivity, precise adaptation, and wide-dynamic range. In this talk, I will summarise recent work on modelling chemotaxis in the bacterium Escherichia coli, including new ways of describing signalling in terms of information processing.
Biography
Robert Endres is Professor of Systems Biology in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, and is Director of the Physics of Life Network of Excellence. The research interests of his group are about fundamental problems in sensing and signalling in collaboration with biologists. In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Before starting at Imperial College in 2007, Robert was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, and in 2002 he obtained a PhD in Physics from the University of California at Davis. He also spent time at the University of Göttingen in Germany and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Science Breaks
Science Breaks is a virtual event series showcasing the impact and relevance of Imperial’s research and work taking place at the College.