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Bergveldlecture, October 27th 2010
On October 27 Robert H. Austin from Princeton University will present the yearly Bergveld lecture. Robert Austin is a pioneer in the new research area where evolutionary biology is studied using nanotechnology. Robert Austin is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and elected member of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
The Robert H. Austin Research Group in Biophysics is a research group based in the physics department of Princeton University which probes the biological limits of evolving organisms under stress.
Their research focuses primarily on the use of microarrays and nanotechnology to further our physical understanding of biological processes, such as the dynamics of cells when subjected to stress. They ultimately want to understand, and possible guide, the evolution of microrganisms by culturing them inside custom-made micro-environments.
They've also recently started to study the behavior of prostate cancer cells inside microenvironments. Here their aim is to be able to determine the phenotypic changes in a metastatic cancer cell that allows it to attack normal tissues.
An abstract of his lecture is included.
The yearly Bergveldlecture is an initiative from the BIOS/Lab-on-a-Chip group.
For more information you can contact Jan Eijkel (j.c.t.eijkel@utwente.nl).
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The Goldilocks Principle and Rapid Evolution of Resistance
October 27th 2010, 15.30 hrs, Waaier 4
Goldilocks sampled the three bear's wares for the ``just right'' combination of taste, fit and comfort. Like Goldilocks' need for the just right parameters, evolution proceeds most rapidly when there is the just right combination of a large number of mutants and rapid fixation of the mutants. I'll show using a two-dimensional micro-ecology that it is possible to fix resistance to the powerful antibiotic ciprofloxacin (Cipro) in wild-type E. coli in 10 hours through a combination of extremely high population gradients, which generate rapid fixation, convolved with the ``just right'' level of antibiotic which generates a large number of mutants and the motility of the organism. Although evolution occurs in well-stirred chemostats without such Goldilocks conditions, natural environments are rarely well stirred in nature, as Darwin realized on the Galapagos Islands. For complex environments such as the Galapagos Islands, spatial population gradients and movement of mutants along these population gradients can be as important as genomic heterogeneity in the setting the speed of evolution. The design of our micro-ecology is unique in that it provides two overlapping gradients, one an emergent and self generated bacterial population gradient due to food restriction and the other a mutagenic antibiotic gradient. Further, it exploits the motility of the bacteria moving across these gradients to drive the rate of resistance to Cipro to extraordinarily high rates.
Robert H. Austin
122 Jadwin Hall
Department of Physics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
( website: http://austingroup.princeton.edu/ )
(email: austin@princeton.edu)
(ph: (609)-258-4353) (FAX: (609)-258-1115)
All the typos in this email are proof that I am illiterate
