Date: 8 December 2025 (Monday)
Time: 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, G/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Tao Ni

Prof. Olga S. Sokolova, Professor of RAS, Professor of Bioengineering, head of the Structural and Synthetic Biology direction in Shenzhen MSU-BIT University. She’s got her M.Sc. in physiology at Moscow Lomonosov University, Ph.D. in biology at Russian Academy of Sciences and D.Sc. in Biophysics at Moscow Lomonosov University. Prof. Olga S. Sokolova is a winner of “Knowledge Avant-garde” Award from AstraZeneka, CRDF-Global award and MSU Development Program awards in 2016-2024. Currently Prof. Olga S. Sokolova’s research focuses on the structural-functional investigations of viruses, including bacteriophages and their proteins. She is a director of Scientific center and director of “nanobiotechnology” graduate program of Faculty of biology MSU-BIT University.

During infection, the giant phiKZ phage forms a specialized structure at the center of the host cell called the phage nucleus. This structure is crucial for safeguarding viral DNA against bacterial nucleases and for segregating the transcriptional activities of late genes. Here, we describe a morphological entity, the early phage infection (EPI) vesicle, which appears to be responsible for earlier gene segregation at the beginning of the infection process. Using cryo-electron microscopy, electron tomography (ET), and fluorescence microscopy with membrane-specific dyes, we demonstrated that the EPI vesicle is enclosed in a lipid bilayer originating, apparently, from the inner membrane of the bacterial cell. The phiKZ EPI vesicle contains both viral DNA and viral RNA polymerase. EPI vesicle further migrates from the cell pole to the center of the bacterial cell together with ChmA, the primary protein of the phage nucleus. Thus EPI vesicle acts as a membrane transport agent, efficiently delivering phage DNA to the phage nucleus while protecting it from the nucleases of the bacterium.