Project at a glance

The major aims of my group are to understand the integration, the cooperation of signalling, cytoskeleton and membrane trafficking in phagocytosis and its relevance to host-pathogen interactions.

To this end, we use the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum as a surrogate for the study of phagocytes of the innate immune system. My group made major contributions to the unraveling of cellular and molecular mechanisms of cell motility, membrane trafficking and phagosome maturation.

Crucially, we have established Dictyostelium as a model host to study infection and dissemination of pathogenic Mycobacterium marinum. This system recapitulates the major wholemarks of an infection by M. tuberculosis. In addition, we discovered that both M. marinum and M. tuberculosis can escape from their vacuole into the cytosol, and are then ejected from the cell through a structure, we named the ejectosome.

Recently, we have expanded our repertoir of expertise with the establishment and validation of two amoebae – M. marinum infection systems for medium-throughput screening for anti-infective compounds.