Antibiotics are one of the best tools that modern medicine has, saving millions of lives throughout the years. Unfortunately, the rise of antibiotic resistance bacteria is diminishing their efficacy and endangering the feasibility of most modern medical procedures. Although there has been scarce antibiotic development by the pharmaceutical industry, there are promising innovations coming from basic science research. Irene explains how while trying to understand a bacterial mechanosensor, her team ended up validating a new antibiotic target with very promising properties. Irene has always been fascinated by the living world, specially the ability of living organisms to sense and respond to their environment. This curiosity led to her embarking in the study of biology in her native country Argentina, where she obtained a PhD in Neurobiology at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). For her doctoral thesis, to understand how the sensory information affects movements like swimming in the leech, she studied sensory-motor neural circuits and their modulation by serotonin. Later she moved to Dallas to study the actual “molecular sensors” of mechanical stimulus, that are proteins in the membrane of cells that open in response to mechanical forces. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at [ Ссылка ]
