Moselio Schaechter

Last updated
Moselio Schaechter
Born1928
Scientific career
Fields Bacteriology, microbiology
Institutions Tufts University

Moselio "Elio" Schaechter is Distinguished professor emeritus at Tufts University, and adjunct professor at both San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego. His work focuses on microbiology.

Contents

Early life and education

Schaechter was born in 1928 in Milan, Italy and is of Polish Jewish descent. His family emigrated in 1940 to Quito, Ecuador, where he was raised and educated until moving to the United States for graduate school. In Quito, he studied at Instituto Nacional Mejía, the most prestigious Ecuadorian school. He received a M.A. in bacteriology from the University of Kansas in 1952 and a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1954. He was drafted into the United States Army after graduation and worked at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research studying rickettsia. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, Denmark until 1958, studying Salmonella and Escherichia coli growth. [1] [2]

Academic career

Returning to the United States to begin his independent research career, Schaechter spent four years at the then-new medical school at the University of Florida before moving to Tufts University, where he would remain for the following 33 years. During his tenure at Tufts, Schaechter spent 23 years serving as chair of the Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, became a Distinguished Professor in 1987, and received the medical students' teaching award 11 times. Schaechter retired from Tufts in 1995 and moved to San Diego, California, where he has served as an adjunct professor at San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego. [1]

Schaechter is an Honorary Member the American Society for Microbiology, which he served as President in 1984. He has also chaired the editorial board of its newsletter, ASM News. He became a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 1974, served a term as member of its board of governors from 1997 to 2000. . Schaechter has written or edited several foundational textbooks in microbiology. [3] [4] The ASM awards the Moselio Schaechter Distinguished Service Award to recognize society members who contribute to scientific research and science education in the developing world. [5]

Schaechter has also been involved with public outreach and science communication projects; he co-edits an ASM-sponsored microbiology-themed blog called Small Things Considered [6] and co-hosts the This Week in Microbiology podcast founded and hosted by Vincent Racaniello. [7] He also publishes work on the history of microbiology. [8] [9]

Research

The focus of Schaechter's research group involved studying bacterial growth and cell division, with particular interest in the involvement of bacterial cell membranes in division. Among the notable discoveries of the group was the association of the E. coli origin of replication with the cell membrane when hemimethylated. [1] [10]

Personal life

Schaechter married during his graduate education and he and his wife had two children. His daughter Judith Schaechter is a noted stained glass artist. After his first wife's death Schaechter remarried in 1994.

Schaechter is a hobbyist mycologist and has received awards for his contributions to amateur mycology. He was active in the Boston Mycological Club for many years and is a founding member of the San Diego Mycological Society. [1] He published a natural history book on the subject of mushrooms and mushroom-hunting, In the Company of Mushrooms, in 1997. [11]

Related Research Articles

Gram-negative bacteria Group of bacteria that do not retain the Gram stain used in bacterial differentiation

Gram-negative bacteria are bacteria that do not retain the crystal violet stain used in the Gram staining method of bacterial differentiation. They are characterized by their cell envelopes, which are composed of a thin peptidoglycan cell wall sandwiched between an inner cytoplasmic cell membrane and a bacterial outer membrane.

<i>Escherichia coli</i> Gram-negative bacterium

Escherichia coli, also known as E. coli, is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus Escherichia that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms (endotherms). Most E. coli strains are harmless, but some serotypes (EPEC, ETEC etc.) can cause serious food poisoning in their hosts, and are occasionally responsible for food contamination incidents that prompt product recalls. The harmless strains are part of the normal microbiota of the gut, and can benefit their hosts by producing vitamin K2, (which helps blood to clot) and preventing colonisation of the intestine with pathogenic bacteria, having a mutualistic relationship. E. coli is expelled into the environment within fecal matter. The bacterium grows massively in fresh fecal matter under aerobic conditions for 3 days, but its numbers decline slowly afterwards.

Polymyxin

Polymyxins are antibiotics. Polymyxins B and E are used in the treatment of Gram-negative bacterial infections. They work mostly by breaking up the bacterial cell membrane. They are part of a broader class of molecules called nonribosomal peptides.

Stanley Falkow

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Lysogeny broth Culture medium used in microbiology

Lysogeny broth (LB) is a nutritionally rich medium primarily used for the growth of bacteria. Its creator, Giuseppe Bertani, intended LB to stand for lysogeny broth, but LB has also come to colloquially mean Luria broth, Lennox broth, life broth or Luria–Bertani medium. The formula of the LB medium was published in 1951 in the first paper of Bertani on lysogeny. In this article he described the modified single-burst experiment and the isolation of the phages P1, P2, and P3. He had developed the LB medium to optimize Shigella growth and plaque formation.

Thomas J. Silhavy

Thomas J. Silhavy is the Warner-Lambert Parke-Davis Professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. Silhavy is a bacterial geneticist who has made fundamental contributions to several different research fields. He is best known for his work on protein secretion, membrane biogenesis, and signal transduction. Using Escherichia coli as a model system, his lab was the first to isolate signal sequence mutations, identify a component of cellular protein secretion machinery, discover an integral membrane component of the outer membrane assembly machinery, and to identify and characterize a two-component regulatory system. Current work in his lab is focused on the mechanisms of outer membrane biogenesis and the regulatory systems that sense and respond to envelope stress and trigger the developmental pathway that allows cells to survive starvation. He is the author of more than 200 research articles and three books.

Walter Dobrogosz

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DNA adenine methylase Prokaryotic enzyme

DNA adenine methylase, (Dam methylase) is an enzyme that adds a methyl group to the adenine of the sequence 5'-GATC-3' in newly synthesized DNA. Immediately after DNA synthesis, the daughter strand remains unmethylated for a short time. It is an orphan methyltransferase that is not part of a restriction-modification system and regulates gene expression. This enzyme catalyses the following chemical reaction

Hfq protein

The Hfq protein encoded by the hfq gene was discovered in 1968 as an Escherichia coli host factor that was essential for replication of the bacteriophage Qβ. It is now clear that Hfq is an abundant bacterial RNA binding protein which has many important physiological roles that are usually mediated by interacting with Hfq binding sRNA.

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Bacterial small RNAs (sRNA) are small RNAs produced by bacteria; they are 50- to 500-nucleotide non-coding RNA molecules, highly structured and containing several stem-loops. Numerous sRNAs have been identified using both computational analysis and laboratory-based techniques such as Northern blotting, microarrays and RNA-Seq in a number of bacterial species including Escherichia coli, the model pathogen Salmonella, the nitrogen-fixing alphaproteobacterium Sinorhizobium meliloti, marine cyanobacteria, Francisella tularensis, Streptococcus pyogenes, the pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, and the plant pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pathovar oryzae. Bacterial sRNAs affect how genes are expressed within bacterial cells via interaction with mRNA or protein, and thus can affect a variety of bacterial functions like metabolism, virulence, environmental stress response, and structure.

John Roth (geneticist)

John Roger Roth is an American geneticist, bacterial physiologist, and evolutionist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

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Bacterial effectors are proteins secreted by pathogenic bacteria into the cells of their host, usually using a type 3 secretion system (TTSS/T3SS), a type 4 secretion system (TFSS/T4SS) or a Type VI secretion system (T6SS). Some bacteria inject only a few effectors into their host’s cells while others may inject dozens or even hundreds. Effector proteins may have many different activities, but usually help the pathogen to invade host tissue, suppress its immune system, or otherwise help the pathogen to survive. Effector proteins are usually critical for virulence. For instance, in the causative agent of plague, the loss of the T3SS is sufficient to render the bacteria completely avirulent, even when they are directly introduced into the bloodstream. Gram negative microbes are also suspected to deploy bacterial outer membrane vesicles to translocate effector proteins and virulence factors via a membrane vesicle trafficking secretory pathway, in order to modify their environment or attack/invade target cells, for example, at the host-pathogen interface.

Brett Finlay

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Adjunct Faculty - Moselio Schaechter". San Diego State University. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  2. Schaechter, Moselio. "Elio's Memoirs" . Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  3. Schaechter, Moselio, ed. (2009). Encyclopedia of microbiology (3rd ed.). [S.l.]: Elsevier. ISBN   978-0-12-373944-5.
  4. Schaechter, Moselio, ed. (2012). Eukaryotic microbes. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Academic Press. ISBN   978-0-12-383876-6.
  5. "Moselio Schaechter Distinguished Service Award". American Society for Microbiology. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  6. "About Small Things Considered". Small Things Considered. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  7. "This Week in Microbiology". Microbe World. Archived from the original on 1 November 2016. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  8. Schaechter, Moselio (21 April 2015). "A brief history of bacterial growth physiology". Frontiers in Microbiology. 6: 289. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2015.00289 . PMC   4404942 . PMID   25954250.
  9. Schaechter, M.; The View From Here Group (1 March 2001). "Escherichia coli and Salmonella 2000: the View From Here". Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. 65 (1): 119–130. doi:10.1128/MMBR.65.1.119-130.2001. PMC   99021 . PMID   11238988.
  10. Ogden, GB; Pratt, MJ; Schaechter, M (1 July 1988). "The replicative origin of the E. coli chromosome binds to cell membranes only when hemimethylated". Cell. 54 (1): 127–35. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(88)90186-9. PMID   2838178. S2CID   37707837.
  11. Schaechter, Elio (1997). In the company of mushrooms : a biologist's tale (1st paperback ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN   978-0674445543.