Jon Kull, PhD, The Rodgers Professor at Dartmouth College Department of Chemistry, will present "Structural insights into the mechanism of virulence gene regulation in Vibrio cholerae" at 12:30 p.m. Oct. 18 in 147 Nanaline H. Duke Building.
Dr. Kull is a structural biologist and x-ray crystallographer who is well-known for his work on motor proteins and, more recently, on bacterial pathogenesis and its mechanisms. During his PhD thesis work at UCSF with Robert Fletterick and Ron Vale, Kull solved the first structure of a kinesin-1 motor and showed that the structure was remarkably similar to that of the much larger myosin. He continued to study motor protein structure with Ken Holmes at the Max-Planck Institute in Heidelberg and after his move to Dartmouth. Recently, he has been studying bacterial virulence factors and their transcriptional regulation and has identified in a Vibrio cholerae transcriptional activator that confer its response to pH and oxygen.
The Thursday seminar series is co-sponsored by the departments of Cell Biology, and Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, and the Program in Cell and Molecular Biology.