Carolina Tropini
Biophysics program
Bio-X SIGF Fellow 2011/2012
Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Fellow
Professor KC Huang (Bioengineering)

Cells are much more than the sum of their parts thanks to their underlying organization, which allows for signal amplification, stimuli response, cell division, and many other critical life processes; however, the mechanisms underlying localization and its contribu-tion to fitness have been difficult to uncover due to the often prohibitive task of creating mutants with normal enzymatic activity but altered localization. Carolina proposes to develop a simple, adaptable genetic tool to program the spatial localization of proteins in any genetically tractable bacterial species by targeting the existing localization landscape, focus-ing on the role of two-component systems in development.