Chromosome segregation and cell division in Streptococcus pneumoniae

SysMO is a European transnational funding and research initiative on "Systems Biology of Microorganisms".

The goal pursued by SysMO was to record and describe the dynamic molecular processes going on in unicellular microorganisms in a comprehensive way and to present these processes in the form of computerized mathematical models.

Systems biology will raise biomedical and biotechnological research to a new quality level and contribute markedly to progress in understanding. Pooling European research ...

Bistable switches are the key elements of the regulatory networks governing cell development, differentiation and life-strategy decisions. Transcriptional noise is a main determinant that causes switching between different states in bistable systems. By using the human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae as a model bacterium, we will investigate how transcriptional fidelity and processivity influence (noisy) gene expression and participate in bistability. To study this question, we will use both ...

Strain MK423 was grown under the same conditions as used when growing cells for microscopy analysis; cells of OD600 = 0.4 were diluted 100-fold in C+Y medium with 0.1 mM ZnCl2 and incubated for 2.5 hours until OD600 = 0.15. Cells were then harvested by centrifugation for 5 min at 6500 x g at 4°C. Genomic DNA was isolated using the Wizard® Genomic DNA Purification Kit (Promega) as described previously (Slager et al. 2014 Cell). Fragmentation was performed using Covaris instrument, and libraries ...

Strain MK422 was grown under the same conditions as used when growing cells for microscopy analysis; cells of OD600 = 0.4 were diluted 100-fold in C+Y medium with 0.1 mM ZnCl2 and incubated for 2.5 hours until OD600 = 0.15. Cells were then harvested by centrifugation for 5 min at 6500 x g at 4°C. Genomic DNA was isolated using the Wizard® Genomic DNA Purification Kit (Promega) as described previously (Slager et al. 2014 Cell). Fragmentation was performed using Covaris instrument, and libraries ...

Strain MK350 was grown under the same conditions as used when growing cells for microscopy analysis; cells of OD600 = 0.4 were diluted 100-fold in C+Y medium with 0.1 mM ZnCl2 and incubated for 2.5 hours until OD600 = 0.15. Cells were then harvested by centrifugation for 5 min at 6500 x g at 4°C. Genomic DNA was isolated using the Wizard® Genomic DNA Purification Kit (Promega) as described previously (Slager et al. 2014 Cell). Fragmentation was performed using Covaris instrument, and libraries ...