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Gregor WeberPhD

Expertise

Infectious diseases

How bacteria and viruses establish themselves in a host, why some infections resist treatment, and what that means for the people who get them.

A light micrograph of a Gram-stained smear showing four curved, rod-shaped Vibrio cholerae bacteria, each with a single flagellum at one end, against a pink background of stained debris.
Vibrio cholerae, Gram-stained and photographed at 1,850x magnification. The comma shape and the single polar flagellum are what the species is named for. — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (PHIL 23062, 1965) · Public domain
A temperature threshold that switches a gene onA folded RNA structure stays closed across cool temperatures and opens sharply once the surrounding temperature passes body temperature, allowing the message beneath it to be read.37 °Cclosedopen — message readabletemperature →
Described in words

A folded RNA structure stays closed across cool temperatures and opens sharply once the surrounding temperature passes body temperature, allowing the message beneath it to be read.

Infections are not accidents of bad luck alone. A pathogen has to arrive, survive, find a place to grow, and evade or outpace the body's defences — and each of those steps can be studied, interrupted or predicted.

My laboratory work looked closely at one part of that story: how a bacterium knows it has arrived somewhere new. In Vibrio cholerae, the organism that causes cholera, a stretch of RNA acts like a thermometer. In cool water it stays folded shut. At the temperature of the human body it relaxes, and the instructions underneath become readable. The bacterium does not decide anything; the physics of the molecule does the deciding for it.

Why this way of thinking matters outside the laboratory

Understanding the switches an organism uses is what makes it possible to design a drug that jams one, a diagnostic that detects one being thrown, or a vaccine that prepares the immune system for what happens next.

Related publications

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