Determining the bacterial response to environmental stresses
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Bacteria are highly resilient to environmental insults due to their sophisticated abilities to adapt to diverse stressors. As a primary level of response, they carefully regulate thousands of genes in response to changes in their surroundings. Moreover, evolution can provide genetic enhancements to stress adaptation. Perhaps less appreciated are physiological adaptations, often occurring on short time scales that improve growth and survival in dynamic environments. Most experimental studies of bacteria are carried out in near ideal conditions for growth, which are ultimately poor replicas of the harsher natural environments in which cells typically exist. Expanding our knowledge of how bacteria function in inhospitable and dynamic environments is crucial to understanding and capitalizing on bacterial physiology. In this thesis, I provide multiple novel perspectives on physiological adaptation to stress in bacteria. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the ways bacteria can adapt to environmental conditions and methods for measuring adaptation. In chapter 2, I investigate how starvation introduces heterogeneity in a populations of cells, in which different subpopulations exhibit vastly different potentials for growth. In chapter 3, I explore the genetic mechanisms by which bacteria adapt to a variety high osmolarity conditions in a long-term laboratory evolution experiment. Chapter 4 concludes with a summary of my work and a discussion of future directions with broad impacts for the microbiology field.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Cesar, Spencer Martin |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Huang, Kerwyn Casey, 1979- |
| Thesis advisor | Huang, Kerwyn Casey, 1979- |
| Thesis advisor | Amieva, Manuel |
| Thesis advisor | Fischbach, Michael |
| Thesis advisor | Sonnenburg, Justin, 1973- |
| Degree committee member | Amieva, Manuel |
| Degree committee member | Fischbach, Michael |
| Degree committee member | Sonnenburg, Justin, 1973- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Microbiology and Immunology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Spencer Martin Cesar. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Spencer Martin Cesar
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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