The WHO has announced that we are now entering the post-antibiotic era. We need to either develop new antibiotics or develop new methodologies that use existing drugs, but decrease the rate at which bacteria evolve resistance. 

Our lab is interested in the latter: can we discover new ways to use tried and tested antibotics that extend their effective shelf life?

We are currenlty examining how changes to spatial structure, population composition and cellular metabolism affect the ability of a population of bacteria to cooperate and resist antibiotics. 

Palomino, A., Gewurz, D., DeVine, L., Zajmi, U., Moralez, J., Abu-Rumman, F., Smith, R.P. and Lopatkin, A.J., (2023). Metabolic genes on conjugative plasmids are highly prevalent in Escherichia coli and can protect against antibiotic treatment. The ISME Journal, 17(1), pp.151-162.

Diaz-Tang, G., Meneses, E.M., Patel, K., Mirkin, S., García-Diéguez, L., Pajon, C., Barraza, I., Patel, V., Ghali, H., Tracey, A.P. and Blanar, C.A., 2022. Growth productivity as a determinant of the inoculum effect for bactericidal antibiotics. Science Advances, 8(50), p.eadd0924.

Smith, R.P., Doiron, A.,  Muzquiz, R.,  Fortoul , M.C. Haas, M. Abraham, T. Quinn, R.  Barraza, I.  Chowdhury, K and Nemzer, L.R. (2019) The public and private benefit of an impure public good determines the sensitivity of bacteria to population collapse in a snowdrift game. Environmental Microbiology. doi: 10.1111/1462‐2920.14796

Lopatkin, A. J., Huang, S., Smith, R. P., Srimani, J. K., Sysoeva, T. A., Bewick, S., ... & You, L. (2016). Antibiotics as a selective driver for conjugation dynamics. Nature Microbiology, 1,   16044.

Tan, Cheemeng, Smith. R.P., Tsai, M, Schwartz, R.,  and You, L. "Phenotypic signatures arising from unbalanced bacterial growth." PLoS Comput Biol 10, no. 8 (2014): e1003751.

Tan, C., Smith, R.P., Riccione, K., Pai, Anada, Prasada, S., Kuehn, M., and You, L. (2012) The inoculum effect and band-pass bacterial response to periodic antibiotic treatment. Molecular Systems Biology. 8:617.