We study and engineer microbial metabolism! Located at the University of Tübingen
Link Lab
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Technically this required metabolomics on ~3,000 samples from an arrayed CRISPRi library.
The bottleneck wasn’t MS or sampling.
It was sequencing the strains after arraying.
Paper: www.cell.com/cell-systems...
Hello Bluesky! We’re here to talk #microbes, #metabolism, #CRISPR, #metabolomics and more.
Example:
Knockdown of ispB increases farnesyl-PP.
Add a carotenoid pathway → more product. 🟠
Metabolite accumulation can reveal engineering targets.
This indicated that E. coli keeps metabolite pools low
Because high metabolite pools lead to problems:
They inhibit other enzymes
They cause regulatory crosstalk
They trigger promiscuous side reactions
These roadblocks reveal metabolites we normally never detect.
Many intermediates are at very low levels in wild-type cells.
Reduce an enzyme and substrates become measurable by MS. 🔬
What happens if you knock down every metabolic gene in E. coli?
We measured the metabolome of 1515 CRISPRi strains.
Result: metabolism behaves like traffic.
Block an enzyme and metabolites pile up upstream. 🚗🚗🚗
New paper 🧵
PhD and Postdoc positions opening in synthetic biology, CRISPR genome engineering of bacteria, and metabolomics.
Details and contact here: www.linkmetabolism.com/join-us
Preprint from our lab and @func-metabo-lab.bsky.social: In synthetic nasal communities a single Corynebacterium propinquum strain can exclude Staphylococcus aureus through nutrient competition. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New paper from our group: Metabolism Influences Fosfomycin Efficacy pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...
Metabolic mutations influence E. coli's antibiotic susceptibility ➡️ www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....
