Investigations

Despite a long history in using C. acetobutylicum, little is known about the regulation of the metabolic shift, the characteristics of key-regulatory elements as well as bottlenecks of the metabolism. Goal of the collaborative project ´COSMIC-2` (Clostridium acetobutylicum Systems Microbiology 2; part of ‘SysMO’) is to increase the knowledge of this clostridial metabolism and its regulatory patterns. The focus will be on the key regulatory and metabolic events that occur during the shift from the ...

The aim of the study is to assess the global function of RNase Y in RNA processing and degradation in Bacillus subtilis. To this end we constructed a strain allowing controlled depletion of RNase Y and used microarrays to analyze the transcriptome in response to the expression level of RNase Y.

Challenge: Comparative analyses, as demonstrated by comparative genomics and bioinformatics, are extremely powerful for (i) transfer of information from (experimentally) well-studied organisms to the other organisms, and (ii) when coupled to functional and phenotypic information, insight in the relative importance of components to the observed differences and simalities. The central principle of this proposal is that important aspects of the functional differences between organisms derive not ...