Praneeth Karempudi defends his thesis entiteled Microfluidics and AI for single-cell microbiology.

Malin Lüking defends her thesis entiteled Molecular Metamorphosis in Transcriptional Regulation.

The MSB program retreat in Tällberg had four distinguished visitors who made the meeting extra special. Thank you Nathalie Balaban, Gene-wei Li, Stephan Uphoff, and Johan Paulsson for the excellent talks and valuable discussions.

In this study, we make one of the hitherto largest efforts to explain how bacteria decide when it is time to copy their DNA. This problem has eluded science for over half a century. The article, and the somewhat incredible 3.5 TB of data it's based on, are openly available. The experiments support a model in which DnaA is activated in relation to the cell size and inactivated in relation to the number of chromosomes. Replication is initiated at the correct ratio of active to inactive DnaA.

Johan Elf is awarded the Norblad-Ekstrand medal for his pioneering work on the characterization of individual molecules in living cells.

Elflab proudly presents Shadowfax, a new type of microscopy for tracking single molecules at high speed inside living cells.

Bacterial perseverance is a new phenomenon that helps explain how bacteria adapt to survive antibiotic treatments. We have studied how individual bacteria react when exposed to different antibiotics. The result underlines the importance of adhering strictly to antibiotic prescriptions.

Happy holidays from the Elf lab! May your new year be merry and bright and may all your experiments turn out right. Sparkles and joy from the lab Christmas tree. Look inside to see who won the Christmas tree decoration competition!

On the 2nd of December, the Elf and Johansson labs hosted their yearly Christmas event, BiophysXmas. Celebrating the return to in-person meetings, we gathered in the beautiful UU main building. Still, having speakers online makes the threshold lower for invited speakers, and we had the pleasure of listning to seminars from Ethan Garner and Stefan Upphoff on link.

With our coarse-grained molecular model of different conformation of the lac repressor, we demonstrate how disordered regions assist both rapid exploration of the DNA and recognition of the specific site. This conformational agility explains how DNA-targeting proteins can be both fast and accurate.