Marc Erhardt

This paper describes how the Druantia type III-A defense system in E. coli clears phage infections by recognizing single-stranded DNA and unwinding DNA duplexes directionally.

This study quantifies the cost-benefit trade-off of peritrichous flagellation in Salmonella enterica, showing that increased flagellation reduces growth rate but enhances motility and competitive fitness in structured environments.

BactoMate provides a unified platform for reproducible bacterial microscopy analysis, integrating multiple steps into a single workflow with user-configurable parameters.

This study models how Salmonella uses regulatory memory and growth-coupled inheritance to adjust flagellar number based on nutrient availability.

This study shows human-restricted Salmonella retain preassembled flagella during host cell invasion, using them for intracellular motility and vacuolar escape, while non-typhoidal Salmonella do not.

The paper reconstructs the ancestral complexity of bacterial flagellar systems, identifying 28 additional conserved gene families, suggesting the last bacterial common ancestor had a complex flagellum with more components than extant bacteria.

This study investigates the molecular mechanism of the Druantia anti-phage defense system, showing that DruH-E provides robust immunity and revealing its DNA unwinding and regulation by ATP.

The paper reports the structure of a novel contractile injection system in Salmonella enterica subsp. salamae and identifies a new CIS cluster.

This study determines the crystal structure of E. coli Nissle 1917 flagellin and shows that hypervariable regions affect motility but not TLR5 recognition.

This study shows FliI ATPase is essential for switching substrate specificity and late-stage flagellar assembly in Salmonella, despite being dispensable for early export.

This study identifies FliO as a nearly ubiquitous and ancestral core component of the bacterial flagellar type III secretion system, showing structural diversity and functional repurposing across bacterial species.

The paper identifies YebC as a novel translation factor in S. pyogenes that enhances translation of proline-rich amino acid stretches.

This study determines the structure of the complete extracellular bacterial flagellum, revealing mechanisms of flagellin incorporation and filament assembly.

This study shows that bacterial flagellum assembly is optimized for energy efficiency and motility by balancing secretion rate and filament length.

The paper identifies FlhE as a periplasmic chaperone that prevents the formation of periplasmic flagella in Salmonella, which disrupts cell wall synthesis and causes cell lysis.

This study evaluates 16 fluorescent proteins in Salmonella enterica to identify optimal tools for monitoring cellular processes, highlighting the benefits of degradation tags for improving signal stability and reducing cell-to-cell variability.

This study reveals the structure and mechanism of the Zorya anti-phage defense system using cryo-EM and functional assays, showing how it detects phage invasion and activates defense.

The paper develops arabinose-inducible artificial transcription factors for Gram-negative bacteria to control gene expression and demonstrates their use in biosensor and metabolic engineering applications.