Laws of attraction and repulsion: how do bacteria read environmental cues?

Many bacteria are motile. Chemotaxis, mediated by chemoreceptors, plays an important role in bacterial survival and virulence. In this project, we shall investigate what ligands such receptors recognize and why some molecules are attractants and some – repellents, how binding to the receptor leads to signalling, how mutations in the sensor domain affect ligand specificity and, building on this, how bacterial chemoreceptors can be redesigned to recognise and respond to non-native ligands for innovative applications in biotechnology and bioengineering. Applications are welcome from students with a strong interest in structural biology (crystallography, NMR, computational docking, molecular dynamics simulations).