Research Interests

Bacteria have the remarkable ability to adapt to a huge range of environments. In the Spero lab, we are interested in how bacterial pathogens grow and survive within host environments during chronic infections, such as those found in the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis or in patients with chronic wounds. We are interested in the following types of questions:

• What types of environments do pathogens encounter in the host?
• What metabolic adaptations allow pathogens to survive in the host on timescales from days to decades?
• How do pathogens evolve over the course of infection?
• How does pathogen physiology affect antibiotic efficacy and human health outcomes?
• Can we leverage a better understanding of pathogen physiology to design better therapeutics?

We know some of the answers to some of these questions. For instance, many host environments have low oxygen tensions, and conventional antibiotics often fail to kill bacteria under anoxic conditions. This has profound effects on human health outcomes, and likely explains why aggressive antibiotic treatment regimens fail to resolve chronic infections. We previously showed that the antibiotic, tobramycin, fails to kill hypoxic/anoxic populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms. However, a promising new pro-drug, chlorate, very effectively kills hypoxic/anoxic populations by targeting cells that use a form of anaerobic metabolism called nitrate respiration (Spero and Newman, 2018).

At our core, we are a bacterial physiology lab seeking to clarify the relationship between the varied metabolic states adopted by pathogens like P. aeruginosa and their effects on important phenotypic outcomes like bacterial survival and drug susceptibility. For more information please visit our lab website: www.sperolab.org