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Prioritising Bacterial Pathogens
Our work focuses on priority bacterial pathogens as identified by the World Health Organization. We use both laboratory and bioinformatic approaches to investigate drug resistance, virulence, and pathogen adaptation and evolution. Currently we are working on Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus.
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Group Leader: Ben Evans
View my research profileI am the group leader of the healthcare-associated pathogens research group in the Nowrich Medical School at UEA. I did my undergraduate degree and PhD at the University of Edinburgh, followed by postdoc positions at the University of Manchester and University of Liverpool. My first lecturing position was at Anglia Ruskin University, before moving to UEA in 2016.
Postgraduate Research Opportunities
Please get in touch if you are a prospective student applying to a national or international funder and you are looking for a potential supervisor.
Bacterial pathogen adaptation, evolution and epidemiology
Bacterial pathogen populations are constant adapting and evolving in response to the human world, such as the use of antibiotics in healthcare and agriculture to the use of invasive devices like catheters in patients. Within a bacterial species, new epidemic lineages can emerge that have adapted to survive better in the environment they find themselves in. This might be through the acquisition of genes conferring resistance to antibiotics, or evolving to better acquire and use nutrients in the infected human host. We use genomic technologies to identify how bacterial species are changing over time including the gain and loss of genes, genome rearrangement, and patterns of selection. Gaining a better understanding of these phenomena allows us to understand the effectiveness of current healthcare interventions, and identify targets for new therapeutic interventions.
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Impact of non-antimicrobial drugs on antimicrobial resistance and virulence
One of our key objectives is to understand which mechanisms bacteria are using to become resistant to antibiotics, and how these are evolving and being transferred in bacterial populations. Many drugs used in healthcare coincidently have antibacterial properties, and therefore bacteria can adapt to the exposure to these drugs. However, in doing so, some bacteria can become more resistant to antibiotics at the same time, even without having been exposed to any antibiotics. This ‘cross-resistance’, where exposure to one drug (e.g. a cancer chemotherapy, or the diabetic drug metformin) causes resistance to a different drug (e.g. an antibiotic) is not well understood despite its potential to have a major impact on the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance. By understanding how different drugs cause cross-resistance to antibiotics we will gain a more holistic view of antibiotic resistance that can be exploited in the design and development of new drugs, and in the management and use of existing drugs.
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Our Recent Publications
Genomics of Acinetobacter baumannii iron uptake
Artuso, I., Poddar, H., Evans, B., Visca, P. (2023) in Microbial Genomics.Acinetobacter baumannii from grass: novel but non-resistant clones
Mateo-Estrada, V., Tyrrell, C., Evans, B., Aguilar-Vera, A., Drissner, D., Castillo-Ramirez, S. & Walsh, F. (2023) in Microbial Genomics.Diversity of carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii and bacteriophage-mediated spread of the Oxa23 carbapenemase
Abouelfetouh, A., Mattock, J., Turner, D., Li, E., Evans, B. A. (2022) in Microbial Genomics 8(2)Variability in carbapenemase activity of intrinsic OxaAb (OXA-51-like) β-lactamase enzymes in Acinetobacter baumannii
Takebayashi, Y., Findlay, J., Heesom, K. J., Warburton, P. J., Avison, M. B., Evans, B. A. (2021) in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 76(3)Microevolution in the major outer membrane protein OmpA of Acinetobacter baumannii
Viale, A. M., Evans, B. A. (2020) in Microbial Genomics