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Friday Evening Lecture Series
07/09/10
Lillie Auditorium, 8:00 PM
"Waging Peace: Diplomatic Relations in Animal-Bacterial Symbioses"
Margaret J. McFall-Ngai, The University of Wisconsin Madison
Introduction by Colleen Cavanaugh
Lecture Abstract:
Until recently, animal biologists had viewed bacteria principally as pathogenic symbionts that compromise the health and fitness of the host. The application of new genomic methods over the last decade has revealed that much more prevalent are the essential, coevolved partnerships that animals have with beneficial bacteria, or mutualistic symbionts. Very often such relationships share a set of common characteristics: they are established anew each host generation, remain stable throughout the host's lifetime, and occur as interactions at the apical surfaces of epithelial cells along the mucosal surfaces. These new findings afforded by advances in biotechnology beg the questions: (i) how do animals initially recognize their appropriate partners, and (ii) how do they maintain them in balance? Biologists are taking a variety of approaches to address these questions. Because in humans and other vertebrates these alliances involve hundreds to thousands of microbial species, several invertebrate associations, which typically have much simpler symbiont communities, are being exploited as natural experimental models. In much the same way as the fruit fly and worm have been used to establish basic principles of developmental biology, these invertebrate symbioses provide a window into the conserved mechanisms underlying interspecies co-existence and communication. This presentation will describe work in one such model, the association between the Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, and its bioluminescent bacterial partner, Vibrio fischeri. The study of this binary association has begun to reveal the 'diplomatic relations' that maintain the stability of a life-long colonization of animal tissues by beneficial bacterial symbionts.
Dr. Margaret McFall-Ngai is a professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At UW Madison, she continues to develop the squid-vibrio model to study the establishment and maintenance of an animal-bacterial symbiosis and to promote the study of beneficial animal-bacterial interactions. Dr. McFall-Ngai’s current research projects include the study of how a host and symbiont influence one another’s development during early symbiosis and an investigation into the responses of a host animal to bacterial products associated with microbial pathogenesis.
Dr. McFall-Ngai received a B.S. from the University of San Francisco in 1973 and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1983. In recognition of her contributions to the field of microbiology, she was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology in 2002. In the same year, she received the Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research. For 2010, she was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation to study the impact of microbes on the biology of animals. Dr. McFall-Ngai currently serves as the Chair of the American Society for Microbiology. In addition, she frequently lectures in the Microbial Diversity and Embryology courses at the MBL.
Dr. Colleen Cavanaugh will introduce Dr. McFall-Ngai. Dr. Cavanaugh is Edward C. Jeffrey Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and co-director of the Microbial Sciences Initiative at Harvard University. She received a B.S. from the University of Michigan, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her research focuses on microbial diversity and bacteria-animal symbiosis, including host-symbiont interactions, ecology, and evolution. She has participated in research cruises worldwide with deep-sea dives on the submersible Alvin. With expertise in the study of “unculturable” bacteria, her research has recently expanded to the characterization of the microbiome of humans and human model animals and their role in health and disease. Dr. Cavanaugh has been widely lauded for excellence in research and teaching, including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize from Harvard and the International Recognition of Professional Excellence Prize from the International Ecology Institute in Germany. She was a Junior Fellow at Harvard and currently is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology and a member of the Cambridge Scientific Society. Dr. Cavanaugh is also a Visiting Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a member of the MBL Corporation.
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