A BAC-SMART group

The Bac-SMART Group studies how bacterial stress-response and nucleotide-signaling pathways shape survival under antibiotics and bacteriophage attack. A major emerging direction is to understand how host physiological states create host-state gates, or replication-niche barriers, that determine whether phage infection becomes productive, and how phages reprogram these states. These questions are relevant to antibiotic tolerance, phage therapy, and the control of bacterial pathogens in clinical, agricultural, and environmental settings.