Bacteria employ a range of competition systems that deliver toxins to inhibit competing strains. This study shows that these systems are particularly important for the ecology of virulent and antibiot...

PhD Project - MRC DiMeN Doctoral Training Partnership: Hiding in plain sight: How multi-drug resistant pathogens evade detection and killing by human neutrophils at Newcastle University, listed on Fin...

Biofilms represent a discrete form of microbial life which are physiologically distinct from free-living planktonic cells. The altered phenotypic manifestations of the biofilm may also elicit lifestyl...

Biofilms represent a discrete form of microbial life which are physiologically distinct from free-living planktonic cells. The altered phenotypic manifestations of the biofilm may also elicit lifestyl...

Uridine boosts aminoglycoside treatment efficiency against antibiotic-susceptible as well as antibiotic-resistant E. coli strains.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa PA01 is one of the major causes of disease persistence and mortality in patients with lung pathologies, relying on various host metabolites as carbon and energy sources for grow...

Antibiotic resistance is among the greatest threats of the modern era. Multidrug efflux pumps expel antibiotics from bacterial cells and present a particular challenge by conferring resistance to a br...

Acinetobacter baumannii is a bacterium of great concern in clinical contexts due to the plasticity of its genome and its resistance to antibiotics. Its cells are infected by a multitude of bacteriophages, and the bacterium defends itself with dozens of ...

Temperate phages oscillate between lysogeny, a genomic maintenance state within a bacterial host, and lytic replication, in which the host is killed, and newly made phage particles are released. Successful transmission to new hosts requires that temperate phages appropriately time their transitions from lysogeny to lysis. It is well understood that temperate phages trigger lysis upon detection of host cell stress. Understanding of the breadth of cues that induce lysis expanded with the discovery of phages carrying quorum-sensing receptor genes that promote lytic induction exclusively at high host cell density. Bacteria engage in a cell-cell communication process called quorum sensing, which relies on the production, release, accumulation, and group-wide detection of extracellular signal molecules called autoinducers. Bacteria use quorum sensing to monitor changes in population density and synchronize collective behaviors. The temperate phage VP882 (jVP882) encodes VqmAj – a homolog of its host’s quorum-sensing receptor/transcription factor VqmA. VqmAj allows jVP882 to detect the accumulation of the host autoinducer called DPO. Presumably, launching the lytic induction program at high host cell density maximizes jVP882 transmission to new hosts. Here, by mining sequence databases for linear plasmid phages, we identify VP882-like phages in multiple DPO-producing bacterial species isolated at diverse times and geographic locations. We show that the VqmAj homologs can indeed detect DPO and, in response, activate the lytic pathway. Our observation indicates that jVP882 is a member of a large family of globally-dispersed quorum-sensing-responsive temperate phages.

Zhang, Todeschini, and Wu et al. show that the bacterial defense system Kiwa senses phage attachment at the membrane and assembles a transmembrane complex that halts infection by blocking phage DNA re...

Research Associate - Microbial Metabolomic

Human gut bacteria bioaccumulate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly known as forever chemicals, in intracellular aggregates. Colonization of gnotobiotic mice with bioaccumulating bac...

It's hoped phages could give us new ways of treating infections which are immune to antibiotics.