Job Description
Your function
Scientific background:If you take a bus, you probably want the driver to be awake. Similarly, bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) have long been assumed to require metabolically active hosts. However, several recent studies and our own findings challenge this assumption. We have identified over a dozen phages capable of replicating in growth-arrested E. coli, suggesting that dormancy-killing is far more common than previously recognized. How do phages replicate in dormant cells? The phages we discovered are genetically diverse and differentially respond to bacterial knock-outs, pointing to multiple, evolutionarily distinct solutions to this challenge.
Project: you will integrate high-throughput phenotypic screening with state-of-the-art genetic tools to understand how phages bypass bacterial dormancy. Furthermore, you will engineer these genes into phages that lack this capability, expanding their activity towards persistent ...