Georgina Benn is a Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. She works in the group of Prof Colin Kleanthous, studying the organisation of the bacterial outer membrane. Georgina uses AFM to get high-resolution topography images of the surfaces of live E. coli. Georgina finds AFM is a great technique for this work as it enables the team to look at where proteins are relative to each other and relative to the whole cell. They use this information to see how this arrangement changes as cells grow, divide and die. Georgina combines this with microbiology and genetics to try to understand how the outer membrane is such an effective barrier to external toxins, hopefully finding ways others can exploit it in the design of new antibiotics.
Georgina Benn
Recent AFM-related publications:
Biography: Georgina grew up in the UK and studied Biochemistry at King’s College London. She says: “I’ve always been interested in how biology fits together spatially. So, when I started my Biophysics PhD in Prof Hoogenboom’s lab at University College London, I really enjoyed using AFM to ask biological questions that cannot be answered by other techniques.” After her PhD Georgina had a great time doing a postdoc in molecular biology at Princeton University with Prof Silhavy. She is now combining the skills she learnt during her PhD and postdoc in Oxford, to try to improve our understanding of the bacterial outer membrane.
Webpage: https://benngeorgina.wordpress.com/
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