Forschung

Tony Pugsley studied bacteriology and genetics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, where he received his PhD in Applied Microbiology in 1972. After a short period in a pharmaceutical company laboratory, Tony switched to studying bacterial membrane biology as a postdoctoral fellowship in Peter Reeves's group in Adelaide, Australia. Here, Tony worked on the uptake of colicins (toxins produced by and active against Escherichia coli) and on the mechanisms of iron capture by bacteria, both of which rely on the same outer membrane receptors and transport systems. Tony's next postdoctoral port of call was Charlottesville in Virginia, USA, where he worked in Carl Schnaitman's group on major E. coli outer membrane proteins, notably on their structure and role in membrane permeability. From Charlottesville, Tony move to Jürg Rosenbusch's laboratory at the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland, where he continued working on the control of outer membrane protein production, and also on the production and release of colicins from producing cells. He continued the latter when he took a postdoctoral fellowship in Maxime Schwartz's lab at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. This led to his current interest in the mechanisms of protein localization and secretion.

Tony is now Professor of the Institut Pasteur, where he both is Scientific Director and head of a research unit of around 20 working on bacterial transcription factors and bacterial protein traffic. His main interests are in how proteins find their correct location in bacteria, how bacterial surface structures are assembled, how proteins insert into or cross the bacterial outer membrane, and posttranslational modification of exported proteins. He is a member of EMBO and the Leopoldina Academy, a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and special features editor of the journal Molecular Microbiology.