MBIO 4440 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Caulobacter Crescentus, Lucy Shapiro, Proteobacteria
20 Jan 2019
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Last class, we concluded that studying the bacterial cell cycle using e. coli as the model organism poses two challenges. First, it is difficult to synchronize an e. coli cell culture. Second, within the same cell, the different steps of the cell cycle could be confounded as the cells prepare for the next step of the cell cycle without finishing the previous one. Today we are going to switch to another model organism that will help us to overcome these experimental limitations. Lucy shapiro, a scientist working at the stanford university school of medicine who found that the free living bacterium caulobacter crescentus was an excellent model for studying the bacterial cell cycle. Caulobacter is an aquatic -proteo-bacterium that divides asymmetrically to produce differentiated progeny. When caulobacter divides, a swarmer and a stalked daughter cell are produced, each with distinct morphology.
