Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SalPhagoHet (Characterisation of permissive and non-permissive phagosome environments during Salmonella systemic infection)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-09-01 al 2023-08-31
Antibiotic resistance is a threat to global health. When a bacterium becomes resistant to several antibiotics, it can become very difficult to find a way to treat that specific infection. Additionally, the person infected can easily spread the same multi-drug resistant pathogen to other people. It is becoming increasingly challenging to identify new, efficient drugs and, therefore, novel control strategies to synergise with the immune system are urgently required.
The aim of this action was to identify potential permissive conditions that allow pathogen survival and spread. Specific objectives of this Marie Skłodowska Curie Action (MSCA) have been to (a) develop a new approach of phagosome isolation by fluorescence-activated cell sorting and combine it with sensitive high-resolution mass spectrometry to determine host protein markers over the infection; (b) highlight key bacterial strategies for intracellular survival, potentially identifying novel antimicrobial targets.
Results of this MSCA are going to be reported in forthcoming papers on how differences in host-pathogen interactions affect pathogen clearance during bacterial infections. Importantly, the method developed during this MSCA is not limited to Salmonella infection and will be broadly applicable to the study of other important infectious diseases. The data sets collected during the fellowship will be made available to the scientific community and will inform other publications in the coming years.
This MSCA has pushed the frontiers of infection biology as it allowed the Fellow to study the pathogen and the antibacterial immune response simultaneously, with an omics approach. This novel method will shed light on host-pathogen interactions during infections of other intracellular pathogens and immune cell types. Additionally, this method could potentially be applied to the study of indicidual phagosomes highlighting heterogeneous host-pathogen encounters. Such an approach would help developing new target therapies synergising with the host immune system to increase antibacterial activities within phagosomes that would otherwise allow bacteria to proliferate. Through the Fellow’s research on phagosome biology, valuable new understandings are emerging related on how pathogens adapt to hostile immune attacks and what can be done in the future to eradicate antimicrobial resistant pathogens.