Navish Wadhwa, ASU
When
Where
Title: How bacteria move, with and without flagella
Abstract: Bacteria are tiny, but their world is anything but simple. To survive, spread, and cause infection, they must constantly move through environments that are crowded, viscous, and ever-changing. Many bacteria swim using flagella, spinning helical filaments driven by one of the smallest rotary motors in nature, powered by an electrochemical gradient across the cell membrane. I will discuss how this motor can sense when the going gets tough and automatically adjust its torque output, like a car shifting gears on a steep hill. We've also found that bacteria can evolve to become better swimmers surprisingly fast: when forced to swim in complex environments, they find two clever solutions—grow more flagella, or reshape the ones they already have. And if bacteria have no flagella at all, movement is still possible by “swashing” across surfaces on osmotically-driven waves of fluid they generate themselves.
Bio: Navish Wadhwa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and the Biodesign Center for Mechanisms of Evolution at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in Physics from the Technical University of Denmark and completed postdoctoral training in Biophysics and Cell Biology at Harvard University. His lab at ASU studies how mechanical interactions between bacteria and their environment shape bacterial behavior, and how bacteria sense and respond to physical stimuli at the molecular and cellular scales. Wadhwa is a recipient of the NIH Pathways to Independence Award and the New Investigator Award from the Arizona Biomedical Research Center.
3:00 PM in PAS 201 / Zoom https://arizona.zoom.us/j/86395646910
Refreshments in PAS 236, 2:30PM