Unveiling Low-Power Survival Strategies on Life’s Metabolic Edge
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Dianne Newman, Ph.D.
Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology
Merkin Institute Professor
California Institute of Technology
Dianne Newman is a molecular microbiologist, a professor in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering and the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at California Institute of Technology. Her research interests include bioenergetics and cell biology of metabolically diverse, genetically-tractable bacteria. Her work deals with electron-transfer reactions that are part of the metabolism of microorganisms. She was awarded the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award in Molecular Biology for her "discovery of microbial mechanisms underlying geologic processes." The award citation recognizes her for "launching the field of molecular geomicrobiology" and fostering greater awareness of the important roles microorganisms have played and continue to play in how Earth evolved. In 2025, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She was one of the recipients of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowships. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.
Summary
A maintenance state – characterized by metabolic activity in the absence of growth – underpins how many bacteria exist in nature and disease, particularly in the cores of biofilms, multicellular aggregates surrounded by a self-produced polymeric matrix. Biofilms are notoriously difficult to eradicate because they fail to respond to conventional drugs. Yet this failure is to be expected because most antibiotics target processes that are required for cell growth, not maintenance. Despite this recognition, the study of maintenance has been challenging due to the lack of a good experimental platform. In this seminar, I will describe the insights we are gaining into maintenance metabolism using a promising new system involving the study of anaerobic survival by the nosocomial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa—a system that captures the key conditions relevant to biofilm cores, yet is high throughput, quantitative and mechanistically tractable. These insights are not only fascinating from a basic research perspective, but biomedically important because they have the potential to lead us to new drug targets for diverse chronic infections.
Learning Objectives:
- To gain an appreciation for the plasticity of bacterial metabolism.
- To learn how redox-active metabolites can be leveraged to measure cell-specific metabolic rates.
- To understand how sustained pursuit of basic scientific curiosity employing interdisciplinary research can help identify new drug targets to treat chronic infections.
This page was last updated on Friday, November 14, 2025