I am a first-year PhD student at the Puxty’s Lab at the School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, UK. My PhD work focuses on elucidating the role of tRNA’s in mycobacteriophages with respect to its virulence and host range. My work involves the evolution of mycobacteriophages against their hosts and generating tRNA mutants in them.
My interest in bacteriophages was rekindled during my Master’s by research degree, wherein the potential of them had made me inspire me further down into this exploration. I have isolated and characterized two bacteriophages infecting aquaculture pathogens, especially Citrobacter spp. I have characterized their efficacy in the zebrafish (Danio rerio) model. The phage cocktails had better therapeutic potential than the individual phages.
I would like to share a few of my inspirations; the prime one was from reading the story of Dr. Steffanie Strathdee’s vacation to Egypt in late 2015 with her husband, Dr. Tom Patterson, during which he acquired the deadly multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, and when all the antibiotics failed to eliminate the pathogen, the phages came to their rescue to save his life.
Recently one more successful phage therapy in 2019 with a personalized treatment of a Mycobacterium abscessus infection to a 15-year old girl with a double lung transplant proved the efficiency of phage therapy as a last resort medication. The treatment consisted of a phage cocktail with three phages, namely Muddy, ZoeJ, and BPs, and the decisive thing was that two of them were recombineered for removing a gene as it belongs to the temperate phage. This strategy made the wounds disappear and improved liver function.