Bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria—are among the most evolutionarily dynamic biological systems
Their remarkable ability to adapt to new hosts and evade bacterial defenses makes them attractive candidates for therapeutic applications, yet their behavior remains difficult to predict. Our laboratory seeks to uncover the molecular and genomic principles that govern phage adaptability, host-range evolution, and therapeutic performance. By understanding the rules that shape phage infection and evolution, we aim to transform phage biology from a largely descriptive field into a quantitative science capable of enabling principled engineering of phage therapeutics.
A central strategy in our work is the development of experimental systems that allow systematic interrogation of phage sequence–function relationships at scale.
Using high-throughput genome engineering, deep mutational scanning, barcoded deletion libraries, and next-generation sequencing, we generate large libraries of phage variants and measure their fitness across diverse bacterial hosts and environmental conditions.
These experiments allow us to map how amino-acid variation, genome architecture, and host factors influence phage infection, adaptation, and evolutionary trajectories. Our research focuses on three major questions.
01
How do receptor-binding proteins evolve to determine host specificity and host-range expansion?
02
What genetic strategies allow phages to overcome bacterial defense systems, and how are these strategies distributed across global phage diversity?
03
How is phage genome architecture organized to balance essential functions with regions that permit evolutionary innovation?
By answering these questions, we aim to uncover the design principles that govern phage biology and to establish a foundation for engineering phages with predictable therapeutic properties.