Bastounis Lab: New CMFI Junior Research Group launched

With the arrival of Efthimia Bastounis, the fifth Junior Research Group of the Cluster of Excellence CMFI was launched.

Before coming to Tübingen, Efthimia Bastounis was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Biochemistry. There, she studied how intracellular bacterial pathogens infect and spread through vascular endothelial cells.

The Bastounis Lab aims at revealing how bacteria hijack host cellular forces to facilitate their spread, and which biomechanical strategies host cells use to obstruct bacterial dissemination. The lab will combine engineering, microscopy, cell biology, and microbiology to understand basic cell mechanobiology and the biomechanical signals that influence interactions between host cells and pathogens.

Through their research Bastounis and her team envision discovering both, novel biomechanical virulence mechanisms and new aspects of host cell and tissue mechanobiology.

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