Professor Dave Grainger, University of Birmingham

The unexpected complexity of bacterial chromosomes

I have been interested in the mechanisms by which bacteria control their genes for my entire career and started to take an interest in how chromosome folding proteins play a role around 15 years ago. At the time, many new genome-scale methods were emerging. Importantly, compared to prior methods, these new approaches allowed us to do genome-wide studies in a completely unbiased way (i.e. not relying on assumptions about the ways in which we expect genes and genomes to behave). This quickly led to unexpected observations and these are still starting to emerge. In my talk, I will discuss our group’s discoveries concerning the role that DNA folding proteins play in controlling genes; from minimising their toxic effects to controlling their evolution.