Vasili Hauryliuk

Project summary

Bacterial stress response

An increasing number of bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. Using state-of-the-art techniques, Vasili Hauryliuk is investigating in detail how bacterial stress responses work. This knowledge will then be used to develop strategies for disrupting bacteria’s ability to respond to stress, which could ultimately contribute to the development of new drugs for bacterial infections.

 

To survive, all living organisms must be able to adapt to changes in their environment – and bacteria are no exception. The stringent response (SR) is a central mechanism in bacterial adaptation that helps bacteria cope with stressful conditions, such as nutrient deprivation or heat shock. Researchers have long sought to understand the SR in detail, but until recently suitable techniques have been lacking. The latest methods now provide new opportunities to investigate the SR system both in living cells and in vitro. Effective tools for targeting the SR could therefore be of considerable importance both for medicine and for further research.

 

The research project comprises three complementary lines of research. First, we investigate how the SR is mediated by a specific bacterial protein. This provides an important foundation for the other two areas. One focuses on developing strategies to inhibit the SR at the molecular level in living bacterial cells – an approach that could have major implications for the development of new drugs against bacterial infections. The other aims to describe how the SR functions within cells using a method known as ribosome profiling, which allows us to determine which genes the bacteria are using at any given time.

 

Our research could ultimately lead to drugs that stop bacteria by inhibiting their natural stress response.