Randy Morgenstein was awarded an NIH F32 Post-Doctoral Fellowship. He will investigate how the bacterial cytoskeletal protein, MreB regulated cell shape. To do this he developed a Bimolecular Fluorescence Complementation assay to study protein interactions in vivo.  It has been unknown if and how MreB regulates cell wall synthesis and…

Albert SiryapornAlbert Siryaporn, a postdoctoral fellow in the Gitai lab, was awarded the NIH K22 career development award. He will investigate how bacteria sense mechanical cues from their surroundings and regulate cellular processes involved in infection and disease in responseBacteria encounter a variety of mechanical forces during the…

Fellowship by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for her proposal “The mechanism and function of programmed cell death (PCD) in Caulobacter crescentus”. In the presence of severe DNA damage, the alpha-proteobacterium Caulobacter triggers the so-called SOS response, a program that arrests the cell cycle and promotes DNA repair. As unresolved…