Florence Piette testimonies about her fruitful stay in Naples.
17 November 2006
Florence Piette, PhD student at the University
de Liège collaborated
in October with the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry
(Prof. Gennaro Marino, University “Frederico II, Napoli,
Italy). This laboratory is specialized on genetic aspects of
psychrophilicity (cold adaptation), especially on the bacterie
Pseudoalteromonas haloplanctis TAC125. Florence was awarded one
of the six BE-POLES fellowships.
‘Before going to Naples,
I found by 2D-DIGE a protein that is over-expressed at low
temperatures. This protein is the Trigger Factor (TF) which
is an important chaperon for proline cis/trans isomerisation.
In Naples, I started to create a mutant of Pseudoalteromonas
haloplanktis TAC125 with a disrupted gene coding for TF. The
system was based on the insertion by recombination of a suicide
vector in the middle of the genein the following figures.
I
cloned the two regions by PCR and inserted them into the
suicide vector in E.coli.
My colleague, Dr. Salvino D’Amico
who came with me to Naples, will stay there for six months.
He will continue the work and he will send me the deficient
mutant to study the physiological effect of the deletion of
TF in Pseudoalteromonas haloplanktis TAC125.
This travel was
really interesting for me and my project and I hope to go
back to Naples to obtain different mutants in relation with
my work here in Belgium.
I thank BE-Poles for the funding that
made this journey to Naples possible.’
Florence also participated
to the International Conference on Alpine and Polar Microbiology
in Innsbruck in Austria, where she presented as co-author the
poster intitled “Protein
folding is a rate limiting step for bacterial growth at low temperatures”.
‘We
heard a lot about microbial ecology and biodiversity in snow,
ice, glaciers, post-glacial sites, cold seas, lakes, cold soils
and also in clouds. I realised that psychrophilicity was an
extremely large and complex field.
We also learned about genetic approaches that were very interesting
for my future work. One of the speakers was M.L. Tutino who
received me later in Naples to work on genetic aspects of
my study. I learned a lot about bacterial expression systems
at low temperatures.
Professor Ch. Gerday from our laboratory
spoke about cold-active enzymes.
An interesting session was on astrobiology.
A lot of people work in this field. I learned that astrobiology
can be compared to permafrost on Earth, thus, we can expect
life on other planets.’
Complementary resources: |
