10.01.2025 Visit of our Mercator Fellow, Prof. Jue D. "Jade" Wang

The new year took off full speed: RTG 2937's Mercator Fellow exchanged Wisconsin for Marburg for an entire week packed with events, talks and networking.

From 6 to 10 January, we welcomed our Mercator Fellow Jue D. "Jade" Wang to RTG 2937. She is professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

On the occasion of her visit, Jade gave a talk as part of our Speaker Series on Tuesday morning, presenting "Themes and Variations of Stress-Signaling Alarmones" in the SYNMIKRO lecture hall. The lecture was extremely well attended and was rounded off by a lively discussion.

Apart from the lecture and a look back on the first year of MiNu as well as a look ahead to the next year, the Mercator Fellow Visiting Week was primarily dedicated to the scientific exchange with our entire research association. Jade engaged in group meetings with the PIs and our PhDs. In individual meetings and visits to our affiliated labs, she gained detailed insight into research at the RTG and got to know our members in person. However, a guided tour of Marburg including Elisabethkirche, showing our guest our beautiful town with its long and impressive history, was of course also a must .

About the Wang Lab: Bacterial stress responses allow cells to survive fluctuating environments, antibiotic treatments, and host defenses. My current research aims to answer the following fundamental questions: how do bacteria utilize stress-induced small molecules to adapt to their specific environmental niches? How do bacteria enter a metabolically dormant persister state that is intrinsically tolerant to a broad array of antibiotic treatments? How do stressed bacteria mitigate potential conflicts between their DNA replication and transcription machineries to ensure survival? What are the molecular mechanisms of bacterial evolution to fit their specific niches? We combine metabolomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics with biochemical and evolutionary approaches to answer these questions. We study these processes in the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis and the Gram-negative bacterium Escherichia coli. These organisms grow fast and are highly amenable to genetic manipulation. Because the fundamentals of information processing mechanisms are conserved across all domains of life, our work in bacteria is broadly applicable to other, less tractable, systems. Click here to learn more about Jade Wang's research.

Thank you for the impulses you gave us, Jade! We hope you enjoyed your stay as much as we did, and hope to see you again soon.

The lecture Jue D. Wang gave on Tuesday morning as part of RTG 2937's Speaker Series was filled to the last seat, and the audience continued into a lively discussion.