Discovering the interplay between antibiotic and phage resistance in bacteria

The antibiotic resistance crisis has led to renewed interest in the use of phage therapy for treating bacterial infections that are unresponsive to antibiotics. Compassionate use cases have already saved the lives of patients with antibiotic resistant infections.

However, there are challenges to the widespread use of phages and open questions remain about how antibiotics affect phage effectivity and vice versa, along with the interference of phage defence and resistance genes.

This is a broad and complicated topic, but is critically important, as therapeutic phage cocktails are never given alone in the clinic; they are always combined with powerful antibiotics.

In this project, we bring together the lab´s expertise in phage defence and antibiotic resistance, with an overarching aim of uncovering the molecular conflict and synergy between antiphage defence systems and antibiotic resistance encoded on prophages and other genomic regions. We will focus on Escherichia coli and its deadly close relatives to answer the following questions:1.

What is the cargo of antibiotic resistance and phage defence genes mobilised by Enterobacterial prophages?2.

What is the interplay between the host-encoded antibiotic and phage resistance arsenal and the resistance cargo of prophages?3. How do phage resistance systems alter susceptibility to antibiotics and vice versa?