Dr. Nathan Lo

The Scientist article Use the force, bacteria said:

“A couple of years ago, Australian postdoc Nate Lo was working at the University of Milan, looking for human pathogens in the tick species Ixodes ricinus, the main vector for Lyme disease. It was all routine until the day his PCR screening protocol revealed a novel 16S rRNA sequence. When his team took a tick apart to look for the new bug, they found it in the ovaries. And, when they looked closely at electron micrographs of infected ovarian tissues, they could see that the microbes were intracellular — living not in the cytoplasm of tick ova, but within their mitochondria.
 
“We’d never seen anything like this before,” Lo says, as he opens the image files on his laptop on a rainy afternoon in Sydney. “They seem to get in between the inner and outer mitochondrial membranes and eat the mitochondria up. In the end you’ve just got this empty sack.”
 
“It’s a very novel observation,” says Scott O’Neill, a specialist in invertebrate endosymbionts and head of the School of Integrative Science at the University of Queensland, who wasn’t involved in the research. O’Neill, whose recent work has focused on the bacterium Wolbachia, says he wasn’t aware of any other bacteria that live inside mitochondria. “It’s pretty surprising to see a bacterial species living inside the mitochondrion, which itself was a bacterium,” he says. “I think it is significant.” Bill Ballard, a mitochondrial specialist from the University of New South Wales, agrees. “This is, as far as I know, the first [bacterium] that actually infects within the mitochondria,” he says. “It’s a pretty cool paper.”

Dr. Nathan Lo completed his PhD in 2001 in Biochemistry at The University of Sydney, Australia. He recently returned to Sydney as a Research Fellow after Postdoctoral Fellowships at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, Japan, and The University of Milan, Italy.
 
Nate is interested in the evolutionary biology of social insects and symbiotic bacteria. He co-discovered the first animal cellulase genes from termites, overthrowing the textbook view that animals are completely dependent on symbiotic microbes to digest cellulose. Using a bioinformatics approach, he showed that these genes were present in the ancestors of all bilaterian animals. More recently, he named and pioneered research into Midichloria mitochondrii, the only known bacterium able to enter the mitochondria of animals.
 
He coauthored A cellulase gene of termite origin (Nature), Evidence from multiple gene sequences indicates that termites evolved from wood-feeding cockroaches (Current Biology), Evidence for co- cladogenesis between diverse dictyopteran lineages and their intracellular endosymbionts (Molecular Biology and Evolution). A novel alpha-proteobacterium resides in the mitochondria of ovarian cells of the tick Ixodes ricinus (Applied and Environmental Microbiology) and The Mosaic Nature of WSP, the Wolbachia Surface Protein (Journal of Bacteriology) Read his full list of publications!