Roberto Kolter

Roberto Kolter is professor of microbiology, emeritus, at Harvard Medical School, an author, and past president of the American Society for Microbiology. Kolter has been a professor at Harvard Medical School since 1983 and was Co-director of Harvard's Microbial Sciences Initiative from 2003-2018. During the 35-year term of the Kolter laboratory from 1983 to 2018, more than 130 graduate students and postdoctoral trainees explored an eclectic mix of topics gravitating around the study of microbes. Kolter is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Microbiology.

As professor emeritus, Kolter has continued his involvement in science by communicating microbiology to scientific and general audiences. Since 2016, Kolter has been co-blogger (with Moselio Schaechter) of the popular microbiology blog,
Small Things Considered
'. From 2014 to 2018, Kolter and Scott Chimileski developed two exhibitions at the Harvard Museum of Natural History:
World in a Drop
'' open in 2017, and
Microbial Life
', open through 2020. In parallel, Chimileski and Kolter wrote the book
Life at the Edge of Sight: A Photographic Exploration of the Microbial World
' (Harvard University Press, 2017). During a 201
interview at EAFIT University
in Colombia, Kolter explained that he is “in a more contemplative phase of his career," adding that he is enjoying "being able to exercise a little more the 'Ph' (Philosophy) of my PhD".

Early life, education and academic career

Kolter was born and raised in Guatemala. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Carnegie Mellon University in 1975 and a PhD in biology from the University of California, San Diego in 1979. He was then a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University with Charles Yanofsky from 1980 to 1983. Kolter joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School as an assistant professor in 1983, was promoted to associate professor in 1989, professor in 1994, and became professor emeritus upon his retirement from running a research laboratory in 2018.

Research

Summary

The research activities of Kolter's laboratory at Harvard Medical School from 1983 to 2018 encompassed several major parallel lines of investigation and spanned many interrelated subfields of microbiology. The overarching theme of the laboratory was to use genetic approaches to study physiological processes (and associated emergent properties) that bacteria have evolved to respond to stressful conditions in the environment, like starvation or limited nutrients, or as a result of ecological interactions with other living organisms. The eclectic nature of Kolter's research program was also a result of his policy of encouraging postdoctoral scientists to explore independent interests. In an interview with ''Nature'' in 2015, Kolter was quoted on this mentorship style: "I let postdocs explore what they want to explore, as long as it is within the sphere of my interest."

In total, Kolter has co-authored over 250 research and other scholarly articles which together have been cited over 50,000 times. Kolter's research group was influential in the study of bacterial transport systems known as ABC exporters, published some of the earliest examples of experimental evolution through investigations of the stationary phase of bacterial growth, and was foundational in genetic studies of bacteria adhered to surfaces (living within communities called biofilms). The lab popularized the concept of bacterial biofilm formation as developmental or multicellular microbial processes, and pioneered genetic studies of cellular differentiation, signaling, and division of labor in bacteria. In addition, his group has worked on other aspects of bacterial physiology, the domestication of lab strains of bacteria, microbiome ecology, interactions between plants and bacteria, bacterial respiration processes, and bioactive compound discovery.

Some of Kolter's significant scientific contributions are categorized below in chronological order.

Major topics of investigation

Regulation of DNA replication

As a graduate student, Kolter's research provided early evidence for what was called the " replicon hypothesis," proposed by Jacob, Brenner and Cuzin in 1962. His work defined an origin of DNA replication that led to the development of many suicide cloning vectors still in use today.
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Peptide antibiotic biosynthesis and ABC exporters

As a new faculty member at Harvard Medical school in the 1980s, Kolter's research group made use of ''Escherichia coli'' as a model organism for understanding the molecular genetics of antibiotic biosynthesis. During the course of this work the group was among the first to characterize ABC exporters, today known to be one of the most important membrane protein systems that move molecules across the cell membrane.

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Physiology and evolution during stationary phase

In the late 1980s, Kolter's research group became interested in bacteria living in the stationary phase of the growth cycle, a state more like the natural conditions that bacteria experience in environments outside of the laboratory. The group discovered regulatory systems exclusive to cells in this non-growing state and found that mutants with greater fitness in stationary phase evolved and rapidly took over the cultures. The Zambrano et al. paper in 1993 which published this finding was one of the earliest examples of evolution occurring in the laboratory, or experimental evolution.

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Bacterial biofilms

In the 1990s, Kolter's group began to focus on the regulation and genetic components of surface-associated communities of bacteria called biofilms. Before then, biofilms had been discovered and were studied in the context of biofouling and in engineering solutions to prevent biofouling, but the genetics of biofilm formation was unexplored and most microbiologists did not view biofilm formation as a physiological process of bacterial cells. The lab went on to discover major regulatory systems underpinning biofilm development and characterized key materials within the extracellular matrix of biofilms using model species like ''Pseudomonas'' ''aeruginosa'', ''Escherichia coli'', ''Vibrio cholerae'', and ''Bacillus subtilis.'' Microbial biofilms have since become a major field of microbiology, recognized as a predominant lifestyle of microbes in nature, with relevance to medicine and infections caused by pathogenic bacteria.

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Microbial intraspecies interactions, cell differentiation & division of labor

Another body of research stemmed from work on biofilms in the Kolter group in collaboration with the laboratory of Richard Losick: the discovery that subpopulations of different functional cell types develop within single-species biofilms of the bacterium ''Bacillus subtilis''. Some cells were found to express genes for motility, others for sporulation, cannibalism, surfactant production or the secretion of extracellular matrix. Some cell types were found localized in clusters in different physical locations and time points during biofilm development. Another study from the group in 2015 showed that collective behaviors like group migration across a surface can emerge due to interactions between multiple cell types.
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Microbial interspecies interactions

Much of Kolter's most recent work focused on interactions between several species in mixed communities, as they typically exist in natural environments. This work has produced several influential studies of the emergent properties and social behaviors of microbes while interacting with other species.

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Segev E, Wyche TP, Kim KH, Petersen J, Ellebrandt C, Vlamakis H, Barteneva N, Paulson JN, Chai L, Clardy J, Kolter R. Dynamic metabolic exchange governs a marine algal-bacterial interaction. 2017. eLife.

Lyons NA, Kolter R. ''Bacillus subtilis'' Protects Public Goods by Extending Kin Discrimination to Closely Related Species. mBio. 2017; 8 no. 4e00723-17.

Communication of microbial science to the public

Kolter is an advocate and participant in the communication of microbial science to early career microbiologists and non-scientific audiences. His work in this area began during his term as Co-Director of the Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative from 2003 to 2018. In this role, Kolter organized an annual public lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts on topics of general relevance, such as microbial foods and drinks like cheese, sake and wine. His work in science communication then intensified in the years leading up to his retirement and now as an emeritus professor through invited lectures, writing and museum projects.

Books

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Germ Stories
' by Arthur Kornberg, 2007 (provided photography)
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March of the Microbes
' by John Ingraham (authored a foreword)
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Microbes and Evolution:The World Darwin Never Saw
', 2012, co-edited with Stanley Maloy, American Society of Microbiology Press,
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Life at the Edge of Sight: A Photographic Exploration of the Microbial World
', 2017, coauthored with Scott Chimileski, Harvard University Press,

Museum exhibitions

From 2014 through 2018, Kolter and Scott Chimileski spearheaded two public exhibitions at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
World in a Drop: Photographic Explorations of Microbial Life
' was an artistic exhibition that featured imagery produced through Chimileski and Kolter's collaboration, and was open from August 2017 to January 2018. Subsequently,
Microbial Life: A Universe at the Edge of Sight
' opened in February 2018 as major special exhibition supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Kolter and Chimileski are guest curators of ''Microbial Life'' and the exhibition remains open until March 2020. These exhibitions have traveled internationally at the Eden Project in the UK and EAFIT University in Medellín, Colombia, among other locations.

Chimileski and Kolter were also advisors and contributed imagery for ''Invisible Worlds'' at the Eden Project, a permanent exhibition sponsored by the Welcome Trust. Their still and time-lapse imagery was featured in th
''Bacterial World'' Exhibition
at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in 2018, and in the
World Unseen: Intersections of Art and Science
' at the David J. Sencer CDC Museum in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019.

Teaching and editing

Kolter has a long record of teaching at Harvard University and at international summer courses. At Harvard he taught Biofilm Dynamics and he is currently developing a Massive Open Online Course wit
HarvardX
on fermentation and microbial foods. He is a regular instructor at the Microbial Diversity Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the EMBO-FEBE
summer microbiology course
in Spetses, Greece and the John Innes/Rudjer Bošković Summer School in Applied Molecular Microbiology in Dubrovnik, Croatia. In 2000, he received the ASM International Professorship Award.

Kolter has been the cover editor of the Journal of Bacteriology since 1999 and was previously on the Board of Reviewing Editors for ''Science'', mBio, and eLife.

Sources

External links

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Science Matters with Roberto Kolter: Fascinated by an invisible world
by Harvard Medical School
Opening lecture for the ''Microbial Life'' exhibition
in 2018 on the Harvard Museum of History YouTube Channel

The microbial jungles all over the place (and you)
a TED-ED animation on biofilms

Biofilm Up Close
FASEB Bioart Award-winning image in The Scientist in 2016

Turning Point: Roberto Kolter
an interview by Nature Jobs in 2015 about views on training postdoctoral fellows
Brave new world: recent evolution of an insect-transmitted pathogen
a seminar given by Dr. Kolter in 2017 at the US National Institutes of Health

Why Write? Communicating Your Results to Further Scientific Knowledge
a writing seminar held at the ASM Headquarters in 2010

Biology of Microbial Communities
interview in 2007 with JoVE


an article about the Microbial Science Initiative in Harvard Magazine in 2007
* Link to all of Kolter's publications o
PubMed
an
Google Scholar

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kolter, Roberto
Harvard Medical School faculty
University of California, San Diego alumni
Carnegie Mellon University alumni
Stanford University alumni
Living people
Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
1953 births
Chemical ecologists