Schalk team

Dr Isabelle Schalk studied biochemistry at the University of Strasbourg (France). She received her PhD in Bio-Organic Chemistry in 1993. She then joined the team of Prof W. Balch at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1996, she returned to France and was recruited at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) as a junior scientist and started to work in the field of bacterial iron homeostasis. She was promoted to the rank of Director of Research in 2006 and is at the head of a research team at the University of Strasbourg. She investigates since more then 20 years homeostasis and traffic of iron in Gram-negative bacteria (especially in P. aeruginosa). She has published more than 100 publications in that field. Her team has an excellent expertise in molecular biology on P. aeruginosa, molecular and cellular microbiology, biochemistry and purification of membrane proteins, siderophore chemistry.

Véronique Gasser has a master in Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Strasbourg. She joined the CNRS in 2000 as an engineer in the team of Dr R. Fuchs, working on molecular mutagenesis and carcinogenesis. In 2009, she joined the team of Dr I. Schalk as a lab manager. She has developed a large amount of P. aeruginosa iron uptake mutants and the molecular biology used in the team. In the frame of SCAN, she evaluates the antibiotic activities of the compounds synthesized and they ability to induce or repress the transcription and expression of the different iron uptake pathways in P. aeruginosa using proteomic and RT-qPCR approaches.

Sarah Fritsch has a master in Biology of Microorganisms obtained from the University of Strasbourg that she obtained in 2018. The same year, she joined the team of Dr I. Schalk. She evaluates the antibiotics activities of siderophore-antibiotic conjugates and their ability to transport iron into bacteria. Using different biochemical approaches and by generating mutants, she tries to identify the bacterial transporters involved in the uptake of different siderophore-antibiotic conjugates.