Antibiotic resistance is becoming a major global health challenge. Bacteria that were once easy to treat are increasingly able to survive existing medicines, making infections harder to cure. This creates an urgent need for new ways to combat bacterial infections and for better tools to study how bacteria interact with potential antibacterial agents. Since antimicrobial resistance threatens healthcare systems, public health, and the long-term effectiveness of existing treatments, it is not only a medical problem but also a broader societal and strategic challenge.
One promising option is the use of bacteriophages, or phages, which are viruses that infect bacteria. Because phages can kill bacteria, they are being studied as a possible alternative or complement to conventional antibiotics, especially for infections that no longer respond well to existing treatment. Leading health authorities recognise this potential, but they also stress that much more research is needed before phage-based treatments can be used more broadly and reliably.
An important challenge is that phage infection is still difficult to study in detail at the level of single bacterial cells. Many standard methods look at entire bacterial populations at once and mainly provide average, statistical information, which can hide important differences between individual cells and make it harder to understand why infection succeeds in some cases but not in others. There is therefore a growing need for methods that can observe these processes more directly and in greater detail.
This project was developed to help address that gap. Its goal was to advance microscopy tools for observing bacteriophage infection in real time and at the level of single bacterial cells. More specifically, the project worked towards a new imaging platform that can detect tiny phage particles, which are usually too small to be tracked by standard light microscopy, and link their presence to changes inside individual bacterial cells during infection. This is important because phage infection is a dynamic process: it depends not only on whether a phage reaches a bacterium, but also on how the bacterial cell responds under different biological conditions.
By bringing these two types of information together in a single experiment, the project aimed to provide a richer and more direct view of how phages cause bacterial cells to break apart in real time. This work helped establish new microscopy tools and experimental foundations for future research in microbiology, bioimaging, and phage science. In the longer term, it may improve our understanding of how phages act on bacteria and support the development and testing of phage-based approaches as a possible complement or alternative to conventional antibiotics.
