Bacterial Methionine Oxidation Repair and Aging

Identifying the causal molecular processes of aging is a long-standing quest in biology. Oxidative stress is a conserved hallmark of senescence among living organisms, but the underlying mechanisms linking oxidative damage and aging have proved difficult to unravel. Multiple reports pinpoint Methionine oxidation as an important antioxidant system influencing the lifespan of cells. Here, I propose to develop an approach including single-particle tracking and microfludic-based single-cell imaging to visualise Methionine oxidation repair in live E. coli bacteria. Such method is currently lacking in the field and its development, although challenging, could deepen our understanding of how system-level failures emerge out of molecular damage.