Karine Gibbs is a Jamaican American microbiologist and immunologist and an associate professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Gibbs’ research merges the fields of sociomicrobiology and bacterial cell biology to explore how the bacterial pathogen Proteus mirabilis, a common gut bacterium which can become pathogenic and cause urinary tract infections, identifies self versus non-self. In 2013, Gibbs and her team were the first to sequence the genome of P. mirabilis BB2000, the model organism for studying self-recognition. In graduate school at Stanford University, Gibbs helped to pioneer the design of a novel tool that allowed for visualization of the movement of bacterial membrane proteins in real time. In 2020, Gibbs was recognized by Cell Press as one of the top 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America.
Early life and education Gibbs was born in Jamaica. When she was a child, her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she attended middle school and high school. In high school, Gibbs ran track and field, just as her parents had when they were in high school. In addition to her athletic endeavours, Gibbs also pursued research opportunities in high school. She completed a summer research internship at Villanova University and two summer internships at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease studying viruses. In 1996, Gibbs pursued her undergraduate degree at Harvard University with an interest in studying microorganisms. Gibbs majored in biochemical sciences and pursued undergraduate research with Roberto Kolter at Harvard Medical School studying biofilms on implants and medical devices. She became second author on a paper exploring the role of nutrient availability in the formation of biofilms. She found that the catabolite repression control protein, which regulates carbon metabolism, is essential for biofilm formation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. In addition to her research, Gibbs taught science to elementary and middle school students during her undergraduate degree. After graduating from Harvard in 2000, Gibbs attended Stanford University for her graduate studies in microbiology and immunology. Under the mentorship of Julie Theriot, Gibbs explored the movement of surface proteins within bacterial membranes and on bacterial surface walls. During her PhD, Gibbs collaborated with two other labs at Stanford to develop a novel tool to tag the surface proteins on bacteria while they were living to enable visualization of protein movement within the membrane throughout the microbial life cycle. Her tool is now used today by many labs around the world. Her thesis work utilized this tool to explore the dynamic distribution of LamB, an integral outer membrane protein in E. coli, that is responsible for maltose uptake and attachment of bacteriophages. She found two populations of the LamB protein, one that has restricted mobility and one that has high mobility in the membrane. After completing her graduate work at Stanford in 2005, Gibbs pursued her postdoctoral work in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. She was mentored by E. Peter Greenberg, and began studying the biofilm forming bacteria, Proteus mirabilis. P. mirabilis forms biofilms on urinary catheters which leads to infections that are often resistant to many antibiotics. Gibbs began exploring the self recognition genes that she hypothesized led to the ability of P. mirabilis to form distinct boundaries between cells of different strains. The study of the ability of bacteria to determine self versus non-self is a very rudimentary form of the ability of immune cells in mammals to detect self versus non-self, and thus Gibbs’ work will lend insight into questions that pertain to humans as well as bacteria. As such, Gibbs explored a set of mutant P. mirabilis in her postdoc that formed boundaries between itself and its parent strain, thus this mutation rendered the bacteria unable to effectively determine self versus non-self. She mapped the loci of these mutations to a six-gene locus that she called Ids for identification of self. She later found that the Ids genes are transcribed as an operon and she located the promoter region of the operon. When swarms of non-self bacteria approached a population of P. mirabilis, expression of the ids operon was increased.
Career and research In 2010, Gibbs was recruited to Harvard University and was appointed Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. In 2015, Gibbs was promoted to Associate Professor. Gibbs has had a passion for teaching since her undergraduate years and thus teaches two classes at Harvard, “The Microbes” and “Social Behaviors and Genetics of Bacteria”. Gibbs is also the principal investigator of the Gibbs Lab where she continue to explore social behaviors in the bacterium P. mirabilis with a focus on how cells determine self versus non-self. Her lab uses genetic techniques to harness the simplicity of P. mirabilis to understand the biological substrates of cell-cell communication, competition, and cooperation. In addition, Gibbs is collaborating with interdisciplinary groups at Harvard to explore the mechanisms of pathogenesis of P. mirabilis, as it is harmless in the gut, but can spread of the kidney and form biofilms on urinary catheters causing infection and disease. Gibbs is also an editor for eLife for the subject area of Microbial and Infectious Disease. Gibbs was appointed as associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2021.
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