This was for the same talk at harvard. This talk was incredibly interesting and focused on how cells grow in a defined rod shape. The purpose of the talk was to explain how cells maintained a uniform width while expanding from a spherical shape to a rod shape. The organism used in the study was Bacillus subtilis, it was used because it is a rod shaped cell. The average width of the rod shaped B. subtilis is 740 nm, this value only varies by 1% and makes it an ideal organism for this study. Knowing that this organism has a uniform width shared by all individuals the question was then asked, how does this organism regulate the width of its rod shape? The way that this was tested was by changing conditions of cell growth, using antibiotic to target certain cellular mechanisms, as well as up regulating and down regulating certain genes within the rod complex (this complex is known to be associated with rod shaped growth of cells). One condition which the cells were exposed to was a salt shock, the salt causes the cells to shrink. This process was used to determine shrinking rates of the cell when mreBCD was upregulated or downregulated. Another condition cells were exposed to was providing more or less nutrients to determine which complexes would be affected by nutrient availability and how that would ultimately affect rod shaped growth. For observing the orientation of cell walls polarization microscopy was used.
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