The Bottom-up Cell Biology Laboratory at CIC biomaGUNE is led by Dr. Natalia Baranova

The Bottom-up Cell Biology Lab aims to reverse engineer molecular assemblies to understand how they function and search for clinically relevant strategies to control peptidoglycan synthesis, biofilm matrix remodelling and host-pathogen interactions. Our general goal is to advance our mechanistic understanding of the key process in bacterial physiology, potentially exposing new bacterial targets and consequently aiding the development of new strategies to fight bacterial pathogens.

According to our "dynamic" vision of cell biology, all living cells do not act based on deterministic programs encoded in their genomes. Instead, they are highly stochastic and can quickly re-organize their molecular assemblies to adjust to the environment. To capture minimal requirements for a given molecular assembly to function, we rebuild cellular processes from the bottom-up. Using this approach, we can elucidate how dynamic interactions are controlled by dimensional confinement, presence of regulatory elements, such as cofactors, inhibitors, multivalent polymers and dynamic out-of-equilibrium protein filaments. With such tunable and well-controlled assays, we can systematically and at high resolution access the underlying molecular processes

In most cases, we reconstitute protein and glycan assemblies on supported lipid membranes, allowing us to track each individual component on a single-molecule level while accounting for the ensemble behavior of the entire molecular network.