Event

Mitochondria and chloroplasts are now called organelles, but they used to be bacteria. While a great deal is known about how organelles work in modern cells, understanding the genetic, biochemical, and cell biological events that happened during the transition from 'bacterial endosymbiont' to 'organelle’ is obscured by both time and by a lack of comparative examples. Surprisingly, some of the best comparative models for organelle formation to emerge in the last ten years are the bacterial endosymbionts of sap-feeding insects. My lab has been trying to understand how these insect endosymbionts originate, how they function with such small gene sets, and how they become integrated into the cell biology of their host cells. I will show examples of endosymbioses at various stages of integration, and discuss how we are trying to go about understanding how the host cell participates in endosymbiont maintenance. 

Join us on zoom here