Open Research Europe presents an interview with Prof Kai Papenfort, Head of the Microbial Gene Regulation lab at the Institute of Microbiology at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, in Germany. Prof Papenfort is also Guest Advisor of the newly launched Bacterial Pathogenesis Collection on Open Research Europe.
This Collection seeks to improve our understanding of bacteria with the pathogenic ability to cause infectious diseases, including food and waterborne diseases that constitute a significant global health challenge.
Research in the Collection can use a wide range of approaches such as microbiology, evolutionary perspectives, and molecular biology techniques like single-cell sequencing, transcriptomics, and proteomics.
Microbes and RNAs are a key area of study for improving infectious disease management, and Open Research Europe is delighted to support researchers in this field with a poster prize at the Microbes & RNA Meeting 2023.
Read on to find out more about the work of our Guest Advisor, the challenges in this research area, and the role of open science in this field.
What is your research area and how does it relate to Bacterial Pathogenesis?
My laboratory is interested in the role of small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) in bacterial pathogens and how they regulate gene expression to control complex behaviors, such as biofilm formation and disease virulence.
Furthermore, we are studying the process of intercellular communication (i.e. chemical signaling between bacteria, otherwise known as quorum sensing) among commensal (harmless) bacteria and pathogenic (disease-causing) bacteria.
What are the biggest challenges of being a researcher in your field?
With respect to quorum sensing, I believe that there are dozens to hundreds of signaling molecules that remain to be identified and characterized. These signals can have important roles in complex microbial communities, or in the interaction of microbes with other cell types.
Similarly, for bacterial sRNAs, we have only studied the tip of the iceberg regarding their functions in the cell and the underlying mechanisms of gene regulation. There is much more still left to understand.
What are the major questions your research area tries to answer?
The chemical nature of microbial signaling molecules is highly diverse, making it complicated to predict potential candidates for microbial signaling without targeted genetic or biochemical approaches. Thus, identifying new signaling molecules requires detailed knowledge of the relevant biological systems, which is a key area of research for our field.
Similarly, while bacterial sRNAs have been studied extensively in model organisms, such as Escherichia coli., sRNAs exist in many, if not all microbes, which remain to be characterized. This is another key research question for bacterial pathogenesis researchers.
Why is open science important to you and researchers in your field?
Work on both quorum sensing and bacterial sRNAs involves the generation of large datasets (e.g. transcriptomic data), and I think it is key that these data are available openly to all researchers in the field. This can help to accelerate discoveries of other scientists and increase reproducibility of results.
Discover the Bacterial Pathogenesis Collection
Learn more about the scope of the Bacterial Pathogenesis Collection today.
