A new "ERC Starting Grant" starting at the de Duve Institute

Liselot Dewachter has been awarded a prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council for an innovative project. The young researcher will challenge the pneumococcus in real-life conditions and analyze its reactions to identify new avenues for effective treatment.

Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest healthcare challenges of our time. To meet this challenge and continue to treat disease, we need to be able to block the growth of pathogenic bacteria. Yet more and more bacteria are managing to bypass current strategies and continue to grow despite antibiotic treatment.

If we are to stay one step ahead of bacteria, we need to better understand how they grow and divide. Many scientific teams are working on this, but most are studying bacterial growth under optimal laboratory conditions. “It's the equivalent of studying the behavior of a caged animal in a zoo,” compares the winner of the prestigious European ERC Starting Grant. “Although valuable observations can be made, they do not reflect the animal's behavior in the wild, under real-life conditions.”

“To get a more precise view of bacterial growth, I'm going to study the main human pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) by applying the constraints that this bacterium also encounters in vivo when it causes infections,” explains Liselot. Using powerful genetic approaches (CRISPRi) combined with cell sorting, she will look for interesting phenotypes that indicate that bacterial growth is disrupted. She expects that this approach will enable the identification of new mechanisms regulating bacterial growth that have hitherto been neglected due to their relatively low importance under optimal laboratory conditions, which are rarely encountered in reality.

Thanks to the ERC Starting Grant Liselot Dewachter will significantly advance our understanding of how bacteria regulate their growth when exposed to real-life stresses. And her results may thus serve as a starting point for the development of new antimicrobial therapies that target mechanisms important for growth in vivo. “Work which, given the emerging antibiotic resistance crisis, is urgently needed”, concludes the researcher.

Find out more about the research carried out in Liselot Dewachter's laboratory.