Seminar Series: Karine Gibbs

By: McKensie Le Fevre

The Department of Biology at Texas A&M University is proud to host an upcoming seminar featuring Dr. Karine Gibbs, a distinguished researcher from the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The seminar, titled “Social Dynamics in Swarming Colonies of the Bacterial Pathogen Proteus mirabilis,” will take place on Tuesday, 1/28 at 4pm in BSBE 115.

Karine A. Gibbs, an Associate Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, studies the social behaviors of tiny organisms. Her team focuses on understanding how bacteria recognize one another, engage in collective behaviors like territory formation, and cause disease. Their model organism, Proteus mirabilis, is a shapeshifting, fast-moving resident (and opportunistic pathogen) of humans and animals. The Gibbs Lab employs various innovative methods in molecular biology, biochemistry, and live-cell imaging to explore these topics at multiple levels of abstraction (genetics to intercellular signaling to population-wide behaviors). Dr. Gibbs (A.B., Harvard University; Ph.D., Stanford University), who received a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering in 2012, enjoys running, biking, and skiing with family and friends.

This seminar is part of the department’s ongoing effort to bring leading voices in biological research to the Texas A&M community. It is free and open to the public, offering students, faculty, and community members a unique chance to learn about cutting-edge microbiological research directly from one of the field’s leaders.
About the Speaker Dr. Karine Gibbs is an acclaimed microbiologist whose research focuses on bacterial cell biology and behavior. With numerous publications in high-impact journals, she has been recognized for her innovative work on bacterial communication and collective behavior, advancing our understanding of microbial life and its broader implications.

Abstract: Collective behaviors inspire us with the promise of greater achievements with fewer resources; understanding these behaviors is important in comprehending the world around us. Further, bacterial communities are dynamic societies where microbes communicate cooperatively and antagonistically with siblings and non-siblings. Individual bacteria must navigate the complexities of these interactions even as the whole population expands. In this seminar, I will discuss how bacteria use a local sense of identity to assemble and move as a community. Our model organism, Proteus mirabilis, lives in human and animal intestines and the environment and can cause disease after moving to the bladder. Individual cells move on the scale of micrometers per second; populations swarm on the order of millimeters per hour. Our data shows how P. mirabilis communicates identity between cells and how this identity-based signaling regulates cell development and population-wide swarming. Our research addresses how an organism’s identity, communication, and local environment influence collective behaviors.