26 mai 2011: Dr Michael Otto

Thursday, May 26th 2011, 12h30

Dr Michael Otto
Chief, Pathogen Molecular Genetics Section, Senior Investigator
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
National Institute of Haelth (NIH), USA

" The Many Faces of Bacterial Virulence"
PSMs are a family of detergent-like peptides produced by staphylococci. They have multiple functions, including the capacities to stimulate human innate host defense, lyse human phagocytes and erythrocytes, and structure biofilms. These mechanisms result in a key contribution of PSMs to acute and biofilm-associated infection by pathogenic staphylococci. The various functions of PSMs will be presented, including recent data that give insight into the structure-function relationship of the various PSM activities.

Biography
Dr. Michael Otto, a native of Germany, studied biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen, Germany and did his Ph.D. thesis and a 2-year postdoc at the microbiology department under the supervision of Dr. Friedrich Gotz at the same university. In 2001, he was hired as a tenure-track investigator by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, The National Institutes of Health. He spent 7 years at the NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories facility in Hamilton, Montana before receiving tenure and moving to the NIH main campus in 2008. Dr. Otto is a specialist in staphylococcal pathogenesis. His main research foci are in staphylococcal peptide cytolysins, mechanisms of staphylococci to evade human innate host defense, and the basis of virulence of MRSA. He has published more than 100 papers, among those original research publications as senior author in high-impact journals such as Nature Medicine, PNAS, Molecular Cell, The Journal of Clinical Investigation, and PLoS Pathogens.