Abstract:
Trained as a biochemist, I was in the past guilty of thinking of microbial (non-eukaryotic) cells as mixed bags of organic and some inorganic chemistry. But, advances in cellular imaging techniques have, and continue to, reveal a high degree of compositional and activity heterogeneity within cells. It seems that gaining an understanding of how and why specific cell components are geographically positioned within cells will be critical to understanding how life works today and also emerged in the past. In this talk, I will introduce methodological concepts and techniques which help illuminate cellular structure-function relationships. These results suggest mechanisms for specific activity-location relationships, reveal a new mechanism of direct interspecies electron transfer reactions, and even lead to speculations on the origin of mitochondria.