Research projects of current students

Vidhi Grover: Start date: October 2009; Nationality: Indian; Master thesis:
Production and Characterization of Carbonic Anhydrase of Sporosarcina pasteurii (2009) University of Delhi, South Campus, Delhi, India.; Research group:
AG Higgs, Dept. of Ecophysiology, MPI; Research project description:
My PhD project aims at understanding how the process of cell fate determination is regulated during the starvation induced developmental program in the bacterium Myxococcus xanthus. Under the starvation conditions that we use, analysis of cell populations after the completion of the developmental program suggests that ~15% of the initial population aggregate into mounds (fruiting bodies) within which they then differentiate into environmentally resistant spores. In contrast, ~5% of the initial population do not aggregate and remain as peripheral rods outside of the fruiting bodies. The remaining 80% of the cells are thought to undergo cell lysis. This developmental program is tightly regulated at the molecular level by specific marker proteins. I am analyzing single-cell expression of these key regulator genes in the different subpopulations of cells during development using a combination of molecular biological and fluorescent microscopic techniques with the ultimate goal to understand what exactly drives the multicellular fate decisions during this developmental program.