Under the auspices of the Princess Lilian Foundation Chair, the laboratory of Prof. Jean-François Collet, of UCL’s de Duve Institute, welcomes Harvard Medical School Prof. Daniel Kahne from 18 to 21 April. This visiting professor chair is intended to spark interaction between Belgian research teams and internationally recognised experts.
Prof. Daniel Kahne will deliver an opening lecture concerning his bacterial cell envelope research and its focus on antibiotic resistance. He will then preside over a mini-symposium, on Friday 21 April, where young researchers will present their findings. During these four days, Prof. Kahne, accompanied by Prof. Collet and his team, will meet researchers at Belgian universities, senior, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in the fields of microbiology, chemistry and pharmacology.
Prof. Daniel Kahne leads the Kahne Lab of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, where he is Higgins Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and of Molecular and Cellular Biology. For the past 15 years, the Kahne Lab has sought to understand the biogenesis of the cell envelope of gram-negative bacteria, which can only be done outside the cell in the absence of an obvious energy source. His research focuses on identifying and understanding the machinery necessary for proper assembly of this organellar membrane, in particular peptidoglycan biosynthesis and outer membrane assembly. Because the outer membrane creates an effective permeability barrier to most antibiotics, understanding how to interfere with its assembly could provide new targets for antibiotic discovery.
Jean-François Collet, an FNRS Senior Research Associate at UCL’s de Duve Institute, a WELBIO researcher and a 2011 European Research Council grant recipient, also focuses on antibiotic resistance. ‘We want to understand how bacteria respond to external aggression, in order to disarm them. Our laboratory participates in the worldwide effort to prevent the return of epidemics that ravaged humanity prior to the discovery to the first antibiotic, penicillin. It’s an immense task, and we want to contribute to it by understanding how bacteria defend themselves against toxic molecules, including antibiotics. In another words, we want to understand how bacteria respond to stressors in their environment.’
In December 2015, with the team of Frédéric Barras, CNRS (France) Unit Director and professor at the Université Aix-Marseille, Prof. Collet’s laboratory discovered a system (called MsrPQ) that allowed gram-negative bacteria to defend themselves against the ‘bleach’ in our bodies and hypochlorite. The Belgian and French research teams, world leaders in oxidised protein repair system research, worked in close collaboration, leading to their work’s publication in the journal Nature.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION: www.across-the-envelope.org
Register for the opening lecture, ‘From penicillin to the PEZ™ machine’, at https://uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/deduve/events/from-penicillin-to-the-pez™-machine.html