The work of Prof. Anna Pawlik’s team awarded a distinction in the Prof. Bassalik competition

It is with great pleasure that we announce that the Molecular Cell Biology Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences has awarded an honorable mention in the Prof. K. Bassalik competition for the paper prepared under the leadership of Anna Zawilak-Pawlik, DSc:

Noszka M, Strzałka A, Muraszko J, Kolenda R, Meng C, Ludwig C, Stingl K, Zawilak-Pawlik A. ‘Profiling of the Helicobacter pylori redox switch HP1021 regulon using a multi-omics approach‘. Nat Commun. 2023 Oct 23;14(1):6715. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-42364-6

( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42364-6#citeas)

The paper shows that more than 30% of Helicobacter pylori genes are under the transcriptional control of the HP1021 regulator and that the protein controls important cellular processes such as the bacterial response to oxidative stress, the uptake of DNA from the environment, essential for the virulence of this bacterium, and carbohydrate metabolism, important for the energy status of the cell.

The results presented in the awarded paper, complemented by subsequent studies on H. pylori-related species Campylobacter jejuni and Arcobacter butlzeri, led to the discovery of a hitherto unknown regulator controlling the metabolism of these bacteria dependent on oxygen availability. The results of the extended study can be found in the team’s paper ‘CemR atypical response regulator impacts energy conversion in Campylobacteria’ (https://doi.org/10.1128/msystems.00784-24)

These works were done in multi-center cooperation, financed by the National Science Center (OPUS 17, 2019/33/B/NZ6/01648), the Horizon 2020 Framework Program of the European Union (EPIC-XS, no. 823839), and the Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wrocław.