Grant: CIHR Fellowship

This project focuses on how defenses against oxidative stress protect the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa against killing by antibiotics. For such, we are analyzing how antioxidant defenses are modulated in a stringent response-impaired mutant (SR-null), which has low tolerance to antibiotics. We are using a series of bacterial genetics, molecular biology, transcriptomics and biochemical tools to correlate the impairment of antioxidant defenses with the low antibiotic tolerance in SR-null, as well as evaluating how the impairment and modulation of individual redox defenses impact antibiotic tolerance. We expect that the results of this project will shine light on molecular mechanisms underlying antibiotic tolerance to serve as targets to counter this grave clinical problem, which results in treatment failure and contributes for the arising of antibiotic-resistant strains.