Date and location
Date: February 21, 2025
Venue: ULB, Erasme Campus, W complex, Brussels, Belgium
Invited speakers

Ophelia S. Venturelli (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
Understanding and engineering microbial communities across space and time

Seamus Holden (University of Warwick)
The role of cytoskeleton dynamics in bacterial cell division
The ancestral tubulin homologue FtsZ is essential for cell division in almost all bacteria. FtsZ localises to the mid-cell as a dense band, known as the Z-ring, where it recruits and directs the cell wall synthesis proteins that build a mid-cell crosswall (septum). Several years ago, we and others discovered that FtsZ filaments move around the cell surface by a type of motion known as treadmilling. This is where cytoskeleton filaments – actin being the best known example – move by plus end polymerization and minus end depolymerization. I will discuss our progress towards understanding the functional role of FtsZ dynamics in bacterial cell division in the Gram-positive model organism Bacillus subtilis.

Kevin Verstrepen (KU Leuven)
Leveraging biotechnology to generate superior yeasts for industrial processes
Our research focuses on characterizing, comparing and understanding industrial yeasts, and using these insights to generate superior yeasts for fermentation processes, from beer and wine to precision fermentation for biofuels, lipids, proteins and chemical compounds.
Over the past years, we collected and characterized thousands of yeast strains from various niches. DNA analysis revealed the history and domestication of today’s yeasts, and also opened the doors to understanding and improving industrially-relevant phenotypes. Using these resources, our team is producing several superior yeast variants with specific properties and aroma profiles for applications in the production of fermented beverages as well as various precision fermentation applications. To do this, we use a combination of high-throughput breeding and screening, as well as genetic engineering.
In addition to giving an overview of the strategies we use to generate better industrial microbes, the talk will also cover a few examples of novel molecular tools that we developed to optimize genetic engineering and directed evolution approaches, as well as our approach to use AI to model and predict the aroma of fermentation products (well, beer ;-).

Lucie Etienne (CIRI, Lyon)
Functional evolution of the antiviral innate immunity across scales
One of the first lines of defense against pathogens is the cell autonomous innate immunity. These mechanisms allow sensing of viral infections by any cell, as well as activation of a wide diversity of antiviral effector proteins. Some of the major innate immune factors, defined as “ancestral immunity”, are present throughout the tree of life and are highly conserved from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Yet, there has been constant evolutionary arms-races between viruses and hosts that have led to their extreme diversification.
Combining evolutionary biology, structural similarity, virology and immunology at different scales has allowed us to discover and characterize some of these key antiviral immune defenses. It also allows us to better understand how diverse viruses may have driven host adaptations, and how these may impact modern host immunity and susceptibility/resistance to viral infections, particularly in mammalian hosts.
BSM Honorary Lecture

Jan Michiels (KU Leuven)
Antibiotic persistence: a journey through mechanistic and evolutionary landscapes
Persister cells make up a small subset of phenotypic variants in bacterial isogenic populations that exhibit transient tolerance to lethal antibiotic therapy. They have been associated with infection recurrence and antibiotic treatment failure. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of our contributions to the understanding of how persisters develop and recover after treatment, exploring both mechanistic and evolutionary aspects, with a particular focus on the relationship to antibiotic resistance.


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