Project

The dramatic increase in bacterial resistance to antibiotics, particularly of Gram-negative bacteria, poses an immediate threat to our health system. The main driver of this trend is the impact that antibiotics, including b-lactams, exercise on intestinal commensal flora of humans and animals by selecting resistant strains. The intestinal microbiota, with its large spectrum of bacterial populations, density and diversity, can be considered the epicentre of the emergence of resistance. The presence of a large community of phages, bacteria’s viruses, called phageome, able of performing gene transfer between bacteria, raised the question of their role as a reservoir of genes entailing resistance. This project has two objectives (i) to study the role of human stools’s phages in the spread of antibiotic resistant genes with a selection pressure and (ii) to gain insights into the fundamental ecology and biology of phages in the human gut over a time series analysis.