Going back in time to trace how bacterial pathogens fast-tracked drug resistance evolution

Fri 17 June 2022

Wolfson College

Antibiotic resistance is indisputably one of the greatest health crises in human history, driven by pathogens readily outpacing our ability to develop drugs able to kill them. In this talk, Dr Adrián Cazares will discuss why the emergence of resistance is an evolutionary process that we are far from understanding, and the relevance of learning the mechanisms allowing bacteria to develop resistance.

He will also present the efforts to combine state-of-the-art sequencing, computational methods and historical archives to decipher how bacteria have adapted to survive decades of antibiotics usage in the clinic, and the lessons we can learn from reconstructing 100-year-old genomes.

Adrián Cazares is a microbiologist and genomicist interested in the evolution of bacterial pathogens and their mobile genetic elements. He is an ESPOD Research Fellow at EMBL-EBI and the Sanger Institute and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College.

Cost: Free