Institute

Maybe you have asked yourself already, since bacteria “invented” almost all biochemical matters of life (except maybe RNA), why humans have epigenetics, for example for gene silencing, and not bacteria?

Indeed this is not true, since bacteria can have even more epigenetics than humans and also use epigenetics for different purposes, for example to keep bacterial viruses (bacteriophages) out of the cell, or also for the sake of fine-tuning gene regulation. However, many details about the epigenetic mechanisms and patterns  in bacteria are unknown.

The MvPI group of Prof. Josenhans in collaboration with Prof. Suerbaum and senior research fellow Dr. Ailloud, have gained more insight into how quantitative bacterial epigenetics can be, and how variable it can become under environmental changes. Together with the doctoral researcher Lubna Patel in our graduate program, they used the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori which modifies its genome extensively by methyl groups, and a particular sequencing method, to find out where the genome is exactly methylated and how much. They made epigenetic maps of the whole genome and could find that certain nucleotides and certain gene networks show more epigenetic influence and fine-tuning than others. Different functions in virulence and housekeeping genes are suspected. Prof. Josenhans and coworkers therefore would like to use the new knowledge in the future to find out more about the function of the differential quantitative methylation and also use this for novel applications, for instance in antibiotic resistance research. The study was supported by DZIF. You can find more information on the publication website: doi: 10.1186/s12915-024-01921-1.