Sebastian Worms, auteur sur Soumillion Laboratory

Congratulation to Dr. Gol Mohammad Dorrazehi

Sebastian Worms — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 06:29:22 +0000

On January 17th, 2022, Dr. Dorrazehi became the newest member of our team to successfully defend his PhD thesis. His thesis title is “The catalytic activity of a DD-peptidase impairs its evolutionary conversion into a β-lactamase“, which is focused on “challenges in in-vivo directed evolution”, to build on previous works of our laboratory to probe the trade-offs between activity and evolvability of enzymes. In the thesis, he explored intra- and intergenic mechanisms to bypass fitness costs associated with activity of enzymes, e.g. he used the ability of CRISPR/Cas9 for creating genomic libraries to lower the fitness cost. The results of his thesis clearly demonstrate that fitness cost issues are multi-factorial and that an initial careful attention to every biological parameter may be crucial for the success of a directed evolution campaign, especially when dealing with potentially dangerous enzymatic activity such as a hydrolase.

We wish you all the best for the future!

L’article Congratulation to Dr. Gol Mohammad Dorrazehi est apparu en premier sur Soumillion Laboratory.

Congratulation to Dr. Jason Baby Chirakadavil

Sebastian Worms — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 13:10:00 +0000

Congratulation to Dr. Jason Chirakadavil! On August the 30th, he successfuly defended in front of a mixed remote and on-site audience. His thesis, “Deep mutational scanning of an alanine racemase from Streptococcus thermophilus” use the natural competence of Streptococcus bacteria to more efficiently probe the way enzymes evolve. Jason’s work ethic, supportive attitude and good cheers will be sorely missed. He will continue to explore gene transfer in Gram positive bacteria during a postdoc in the laboratory of Xavier Charpentier à the INSERM in Lyon, France.

L’article Congratulation to Dr. Jason Baby Chirakadavil est apparu en premier sur Soumillion Laboratory.

MT180 Sketchnoting

Sebastian Worms — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 14:05:27 +0000

The talented Emilie Gobbo took live sketchnote of Sebastian’s presentation for the MT180 contest. You can discover the result above.

You can find the rest of Emilie’s work on facebook and instagram.

L’article MT180 Sketchnoting est apparu en premier sur Soumillion Laboratory.

Congratulation to Sebastian for his three-minute thesis

Sebastian Worms — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 14:33:05 +0000

Sebastian joined the “Ma Thèse en 180 secondes“, the french version of the 3 minute thesis scientific vulgarization contest. We’re proud to announce that he was selected to represent the UCLouvain at the belgian final that will take place on 22/05 in Mons.

In addition, Sebastian also received the public’s prize for his talk called “Il y a-t-il quelqu’un pour sauver l’antibiotique” (“Is there someone to save the antibiotic?”)

Drawings by Émilie Gobbo
https://www.facebook.com/EmiG-256871674860819/

L’article Congratulation to Sebastian for his three-minute thesis est apparu en premier sur Soumillion Laboratory.

Journal Club S01E04

Sebastian Worms — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 15:44:14 +0000

In 1966, Lynn Margulis published her famous paper “On the origin of mitosing cells”. Bringing the theory of the endosymbiotic origin of organelles to the scientific community. Advance in molecular biology in the 1970’s brought evidence and the fact that mitochondria are derived from α-proteobacteria is now widely accepted. Many questions as to how endosymbiosis occured still remains. Notably the debate between late and early symbiogenesis and around the hydrogen hypothesis of Martin and Muller still rages on.

Discussion still rages on the exact way an α-proteobacteria turned into the mitochondria. The late-mitrochondria model where a complex protoeukaryote phagocyte a bacteria and the hydrogen hypothesis where symbiosis between a bacteria and a methanogenic archea occurs before internalysation are presented here. Picture from Archibald (2015).

In this context, this week we discuss an new paper by the lab of Peter G. Schultz out of Scripps. “Engineering yeast endosymbionts as a step toward the evolution of mitochondria“. What if we could recreate one of the endosymbiosis scenario in the laboratory, with easily modifiable model organisms? This is why Angad Metha et al. managed here, engineering a strain of the yeast S. cerevisiae that is reliant on endosymbiotic E. coli to produce ATP from non-fermentable substrate such as E. coli. By adding an ADP/ATP translocase, they are able to make E. coli complement a strain with a non-functional COX2 enzyme, an essential part of the respiratory electron transport chain of mitochondria.

Reading this paper was a lot of fun. It is the kind of project that seems a bit too crazy to be true at first, but apparently it worked!

The lab is at the jamboree

Sebastian Worms — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 09:38:56 +0000

Both our master students, Steve and Mathieu, are currently in Boston for the 2018 iGEM Jamboree, to present this year’s project, Bactwars, a new hope to fight pathogenic bacterias!

L’article The lab is at the jamboree est apparu en premier sur Soumillion Laboratory.

2018 BSM Symposium

Sebastian Worms — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 16:46:01 +0000

The lab was present in force at the 2018 meeting of the Belgian Society of Microbiology. Jason and Gol each presented posters on their projects.

L’article 2018 BSM Symposium est apparu en premier sur Soumillion Laboratory.