Cell Cycle Regulation and Development in Alphaproteobacteria

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the cell cycle regulation and development in Alphaproteobacteria.

Cell cycle and cellular differentiation are fascinating biological phenomena that are highly regulated in all organisms. In the last decades, many laboratories around the world have been investigating these processes in Alphaproteobacteria. This bacterial class comprises important bacterial species, studied by fundamental and applied research. The complexity of cell cycle regulation and many examples of cellular differentiations in this bacterial group represent the main motives of this book.

 The book starts with discussing the regulation of cell cycle in alphaproteobacterial species from a system biology perspective. The following chapters specifically focus on the model species Caulobacter crescentus multiple layers of regulation, from transcriptional cascades to proteolysis and dynamic subcellular regulation of cell cycle regulators. In addition, the cell division process, chromosome segregation and growth of the cell envelope is described in detail. The last part of the book covers examples of non-Caulobacter alphaproteobacterial models, such as Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Brucella species and Sinorhizobium meliloti and also discusses possible applications.

 This book will be of interest to researchers in microbiology and cell biology labs working on cell cycle regulation and development.

Emanuele Biondi earned his PhD in Florence (Italy) working on Sinorhizobium meliloti. During his postdoc at Harvard University and then MIT he worked on Caulobacter crescentus cell cycle focusing on signal transduction, discovering how cell cycle controls stalk biogenesis and proposing the first complete regulatory model of Caulobacter cell cycle. In 2010, he joined the French CNRS, and he’s now working in Gif sur Yvette at the Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC).

The Biondi lab has been investigating how cell cycle is regulated in C. crescents and S. meliloti. Using a comparative molecular approach, the Biondi lab aims to elucidate general principles by which bacteria coordinate expression of genes and phosphorylation cascades with asymmetrical cell division and cell differentiation.