Bacterial Physiology of Rickettsia

Dr. Herbert H. Winkler, Professor, received his Ph.D. in Physiology from Harvard University in 1966 and did his postdoctoral work in the Department of Biochemistry at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Winkler has served on the National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship Study Section, the Microbial Chemistry and the Tropical Medicine and Parasitology Study Sections of NIH, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Board of Scientific Counselors.

Dr. Winkler is a past President of the American Society for Rickettsiology and a past member of the Council Policy Committee of the American Society for Microbiology. He has been a member of the Editorial Board of Infection and Immunity. He has received several honorary awards including Phi Beta Kappa membership, National Merit Scholar Award, Distinguished Faculty Service Award, Louise Lenoir Locke Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, the P. R. Edwards Award from the Southeastern Branch of the American Society for Microbiology, and the Gardner Award of the Alabama Academy of Science. He was awarded the National Institutes of Health Research Career Development Award and also has received the prestigious NIH MERIT Award.
My lab is studying mechanisms of infection and growth by the intracellular bacterium Rickettsia prowazekii.

Rickettsiae, which are transmitted by arthropods, are the parasitic organisms that cause typhus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Rickettsiae cannot grow in any known artificial medium, Rickettsiae grow only within the cytoplasm of eukaryotic host cells. Over the past 25 years, we have been studying how rickettsiae enter the host cell, how they grow and divide in the cell, and how their metabolism has evolved to take advantage of this unusual environment -- cytoplasm.

Audia JP, Winkler HH. Study of the five Rickettsia prowazekii proteins annotated as ATP/ADP translocases (Tlc): Only Tlc1 transports ATP/ADP, while Tlc4 and Tlc5 transport other ribonucleotides. J Bacteriol. 2006 Sep;188(17):6261-8.

Winkler HH, Daugherty RM, Audia JP. Cysteine-scanning mutagenesis and thiol modification of the Rickettsia prowazekii ATP/ADP translocase: evidence that TM VIII faces an aqueous channel. Biochemistry. 2003 Nov 4;42(43):12562-9.

Winkler HH, Neuhaus HE. Non-mitochondrial ATP transport. Trends Biochem Sci. 1999 Feb;24(2):64-8. Review.

Alexeyev MF, Winkler HH. Membrane topology of the Rickettsia prowazekii ATP/ADP translocase revealed by novel dual pho-lac reporters. J Mol Biol. 1999 Jan 29;285(4):1503-13.

Andersson SG, Zomorodipour A, Andersson JO, Sicheritz-Ponten T, Alsmark UC, Podowski RM, Naslund AK , Eriksson AS, Winkler HH, Kurland CG. The genome sequence of Rickettsia prowazekii and the origin of mitochondria. Nature. 1998 Nov 12;396(6707):133-40.