Evolutionary and medical implications of the huge diversity of surface polysaccharides in the Enterobacteriales

Speaker: Dr Rafał Mostowy, Group Leader in Microbial Genomics, MCB UJ, Honorary Research Fellow, Imperial College London

Talk: Evolutionary and medical implications of the huge diversity of surface polysaccharides in the Enterobacteriales

Time: 14th June 2019, 9:00 am

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

Dr Rafał Mostowy studied theoretical physics at the Jagiellonian University and the University of Copenhagen, after which he pursued doctoral studies in evolutionary biology at ETH Zurich. In 2012, he became a postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College London to study evolutionary dynamics of a major bacterial pathogen, Streptococcus pneumoniae. During this time, he developed interest and expertise in genetics of bacterial surface polysaccharides, both in Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. In 2019, he moved from the University of Oxford to Jagiellonian University in Krakow to start his own lab. The newly founded Microbial Genomics group at the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology uses bioinformatics, computer simulations and statistical methods to provide insight into emergence of antigenic diversity in bacteria, and the role of bacteriophages therein. This research helps us to understand and predict genetic changes in pathogenic bacteria and thus contribute to the co-creation of next-generation drugs.