Jena Alliance Guest Lecture: Dr. Colin Ingham

Colour is everywhere in nature, with a myriad of hues and functions from camouflage, attraction, warning and harvesting energy, including photosynthesis. But not all natural colour is created in the same way, something that Hooke and Newton understood very well many centuries ago. Apart from pigments, the main form of colour in life is structural. This means that the organism creates fine, regular structures tailored in exactly the right way to interact with light and reflect vivid, often angle-dependent colour. A familiar example is the feathers of the peacock, but there are many more including terrestrial plants, seaweeds, cephalopods and insects. In many cases the optics of living photonic structures in well understood. The genetics of structural is not, despite that we live in the age of genomics and cheap DNA sequencing. Organised aggregates (colonies) of bacteria can collectively form structural colour, but why would they? We have developed Flavobacterium IR1 as a model system to understand the genetics of structural colour. The genetics, genomics and ecology of structurally coloured Flavobacteria form the heart of this talk. Structurally coloured bacteria offer a way to understand the evolution of colour, a form of ‘soft matter’ to study self-organising biological systems and a route to making sustainable, bio-based paints.

Dr. Colin Ingham obtained his PhD in Microbiology from University College London. During his career, he balanced an academic interest in microbial molecular genetics and motility, with biotechnological application, as a founder of Hoekmine BV. Ingham straddles the FSU Research Lines LIFE and LIGHT, as a strong driver of the growing research field investigating structurally coloured bacteria, both in terms of the underlying genetics and as innovative, sustainable biomaterials. He currently holds a position as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam.