Some bacteria can cause disease but often only in certain contexts. We are interested in understanding how a microbiome influences the onset of disease, and how this affects pathogen evolution.
Many bacteria are harmless and even provide us with benefits, but some have evolved virulence factors that allow them to cause disease. In these cases, the fitness of the harmful species is intimately linked with the fitness of the host: make your host too sick, you compromise your own survival. On top of that, virulence itself can come with a fitness cost for the cells that express the virulence factors. We are interested in understanding the selective forces that make encoding these virulence factors favourable.
Selected relevant publications:
Gül E, Bakkeren E, Salazar G, Steiger Y, Younes AA, Clerc M, Christen P, Fattinger SA, Nguyen BD, Kiefer P, Slack E, Ackermann M, Vorholt JA, Sunagawa S, Diard M, Hardt WD. The microbiota conditions a gut milieu that selects for wild-type Salmonella Typhimurium virulence. 2023. PLoS Biol.
Bakkeren E, Gül E, Huisman JS, Steiger Y, Rocker A, Hardt WD, Diard M. Impact of horizontal gene transfer on emergence and stability of cooperative virulence in Salmonella Typhimurium. 2022. Nat. Commun.
Diard M, Bakkeren E, Cornuault JK, Moor K, Hausmann A, Sellin ME, Loverdo C, Aertsen A, Ackermann M, De Paepe M, Slack E, Hardt WD. Inflammation boosts bacteriophage transfer between Salmonella spp. 2017. Science.
The Bakkeren Lab 