David Baltrus
University of Arizona
Baltrus Lab
Dr. David Baltrus is a Professor in the School of Plant Sciences at the University of Arizona. Research in the Baltrus lab focuses on characterizing the genetic and genomic basis of bacterial interactions with other organisms across systems and with a goal of understanding how these interactions shape evolutionary dynamics.
Affiliations: (1). University of Arizona
Tailocins are generally considered to be highly specific in their targeting and killing activity, and are further thought to be used for intraspecies competition. We have previously shown that, despite previous dogma and assumptions, that tailocins produced by various Pseudomonas species can possess highly specific interspecies killing activity. Notably, we have shown that tailocins from P. syringae can target some Salmonella strains and that tailocins from one strain of P. fluorescens can target E. coli O157:H7. Our follow up experiments suggest that tailocins produced by P. syringae and fluorescens both attach to the LPS, and therefore that this broad activity persists despite highly different LPS structures in the targets. This presentation will highlight our efforts to genetically demonstrate that differences in target specificity are due to allelic variation in tailocin tail fibers and further that differences in tailocin targeting can be localized to a handful of amino acid changes within the tail fibers.