The 5th Leader Seminar Series at BSRC Alexander Fleming, entitled “Engineering bacterial motility: prediction, evolution and rebuilding of the flagellar motor”, was delivered by A/Prof Matthew A. Baker, Scientia Associate Professor at the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences (BABS), UNSW Sydney, Australia, and Associate Dean International Partnerships, Faculty of Science.

In this seminar, Prof Baker explored the bacterial flagellar motor, a remarkable molecular machine responsible for powering bacterial motility. His laboratory combines evolutionary biology, synthetic biology, structural biology and computational approaches to understand and engineer this complex system.

He presented recent work on developing classifiers that predict motility across the tree of life, engineering flagellar filaments with altered properties, and chimerising stator complexes to investigate the limits of motor cross-compatibility. The seminar highlighted how evolutionary and synthetic approaches can be combined to investigate evolutionary history while also enabling the engineering of bacterial motility.