Systems biology approach to study bacterial infections at population and single cell level.
Director of µNordic Single Cell Hub (µNiSCH), providing technology to Umeå University researchers.
Chronic infections and antibiotic resistance are pressing global health concerns, necessitating the urgent identification of new treatment targets. Diverse bacterial pathogens are able to adapt stressful host environments by reprogramming their transcriptome through complex regulatory networks and maintain infection. Therefore, bacterial stress responses can be potential targets for novel antimicrobial strategies. Our goal is to uncover new knowledge of bacterial tissue adaptation mechanisms and identify gene products that can serve as potential antimicrobial targets.
Studying diverse bacterial pathogens, rather than a single model microorganism, can provide deeper insights into the similarities and differences in how various pathogens adapt to host environments. We develop novel tools for retrieving bacterial transcriptomes and employ both bulk and single-cell transcriptomics to better understand gene regulatory networks at both the population and single-cell levels.
Our research focuses on chronic infections and antibiotic resistance, studying various bacterial pathogens during infection using AI, in vivo transcriptomics, and single-cell technologies. We aim to understand bacterial physiology at infection sites, identify conditions that mimic in vivo environments, and discover survival mechanisms that enable bacteria to withstand stressful host conditions and evade antibiotic treatments. We are pushing the boundaries of full bacterial transcriptome acquisition from complex tissue samples, scrutinizing bacterial subpopulations escaped from treatments, and identification of specific environmental conditions to test importance of potential survival mechanisms.