Tues Jan 27 // Accelerating bacterial evolution by multiplex genome engineering

Akos Nyerges
Postdoctoral Researcher (Church Lab)
Harvard Medical School

Akos is interested in advancing genome editing to accelerate evolutionary processes and thus support synthetic genomics and drug development. To this aim, he has so far developed tools to perform precise genome engineering in human pathogenic bacteria and hosts for microbial fermentation. His PhD project focused on the accelerated prediction of antibiotic resistance and the exploitation of resistance mechanisms for more-effective therapeutic solutions.  In the course of his postdoctoral research, he is now applying accelerated laboratory evolution to understand the design-principles of functional genomes.

Akos’ talk will summarize how bacterial synthetic biology opened new opportunities in evolutionary biology, synthetic genomics, and drug development. He will describe how they expanded the toolset of genome engineering and directed evolution to some of the most concerning pathogenic bacteria, and how they later used these advances to forecast resistance processes for antibiotics.

Akos will introduce these developments through his latest project that led to the prediction of potential resistance processes against an antibiotic that is right now in clinical trials and allowed the rapid analysis of resistance mechanisms for novel drugs (i.e., https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1801646115 and https://doi.org/10.1101/495630).