Gert Bange

Research area

Microorganisms provide the greatest diversity within the biosphere and conquered every possible niche ranging from hot springs to the human gut. Key to the evolutionary success is their fast adaptability leading to specific features attributed to novel environmental settings. 

Given their rather small genomes, microorganisms must exhibit an enormous molecular plasticity allowing the robust adaptation of their cellular constituents and regulatory networks to new environmental requirements.

The mission of the AG Bange is to understand the molecular plasticity of microbial adaptation by combining high-resolution techniques with systems- and cell biology approaches (read more). 

Research project within SYNMIKRO

Flagella are bacterial organelles of locomotion and key virulence factors of pathogenic bacteria. We want to clarify how bacteria maintain the exact place and number of their flagella during each round of cell division. This process starts with the exact definition of the future flagellum site, which seems controlled by a complex of two nucleotide-binding proteins in many bacterial species.

Flagella assembly heavily relies on the hierarchical export of large amounts of different building blocks from the cytoplasm to the exterior of the cell, which is facilitated by the flagellar 3 secretion system (fT3SS) . An important biological question is how substrate sorting and export by the T3SS is achieved.

An in-depth understanding of flagellar biogenesis offers promising approaches for synthetic biology. 

(read more).