Speaker
Description
The outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria is a crucial defensive structure, conferring - among other properties - substantial protection against antibiotics. Decades of high-resolution molecular dynamics modelling has provided powerful insights into the structures of the chemical species that reside in the Gram-negative outer membrane and their chemical and physical interactions. However, the extraordinary complexity of these models limits their use to microseconds of simulation time. In this talk, we introduce a coarse-grained, agent-based modelling approach which can provide insights into membrane dynamics on the seconds-to-minutes time scale of cell growth. The model reveals that spatial constraints play a key role in the growth dynamics of the Gram-negative outer membrane, demonstrates the emergence of characteristic spatial structures, and challenges the current biological dogma of how the Gram-negative outer membrane grows.
