Translation in Bacillus subtilis is spatially and temporally coordinated during sporulation

Speaker: dr hab. Agata Starosta, The Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Talk:  Translation in Bacillus subtilis is spatially and temporally coordinated during sporulation

Time: 25.04.2025, 9:00 am

Venue: Intercollegiate Faculty of Biotechnology, Abrahama 58, hall 042B

Agata Starosta completed her PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Daniel Wilson at Gene Center, Ludwig-Maximillians University in Munich, Germany. Later on, she was awarded an AXA Research PostDoc Fellowship to study the role of translational factor EF-P in protein biosynthesis, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to study the regulation of sporulation in Bacillus subtilis on the translational level. After receiving the First Team grant from the Foundation for Polish Science and EMBO Installation grant, she moved to Poland, and as a Principal Investigator at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, to start her own group researching translation regulation and specialized ribosomes in Bacillus subtilis. In Spring 2021, she moved her lab to the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw to start new projects on the regulation of gene expression in antibiotic-producing soil bacteria.

Her work has resulted in 40 international peer-reviewed research articles, a collaboration with a Nobel Prize laureate Prof. Tom Steitz. She has experience in combining biochemistry with structural biology, genetics, microscopy and high-throughput approaches, especially next-generation sequencing techniques to study complex processes in bacterial cells, especially protein synthesis, antibiotics targeting translation, antibiotic resistance mechanisms and translation regulation.