Gemma Atkinson has been awarded this year's Eric K. Fernström Prize for particularly promising and successful early-career researchers at Lund University. Her research focuses on bacterial proteins in order to understand the protective mechanisms bacteria use against infecting viruses known as bacteriophages.
She received the prize for:
Groundbreaking discoveries about the bacterial immune system against viruses. Using new methods in structural and computational biology, Gemma Atkinson's research has changed our view on how microbes survive.
"It feels fantastic to be one of the researchers to receive this prestigious prize and it's a wonderful recognition of the work done by my research team. I feel honoured."
Bacteriophages - often shortened to phages - are viruses that attack bacteria. As they are effective in killing bacteria, phages can be used to treat bacterial infections.
"When a phage encounters a bacterium, it injects its DNA, and the bacterium then begins producing new phages. However, bacteria have various defence mechanisms that protect them from bacteriophages. You could say there is a constant war between them," says Gemma Atkinson.
Research on bacteriophages is one of the oldest fields in molecular biology, but after the discovery of antibiotics this area of research became somewhat neglected. In recent years, however, the growing need to combat antibiotic resistance has made phage research more relevant than ever. To develop new phage-based therapies, researchers need to understand how bacterial immune systems operate. This requires knowledge about the proteins that are the building blocks of these systems.
"We are interested in the weird and wonderful world of proteins! The three-dimensional structures of the proteins are often the key to understanding how defences work. To experimentally determine a protein's structure takes a long time, but by using AlphaFold, an AI-driven program, we can now predict proteins' structures and functions a lot faster."
Even so, it is not easy to establish how bacterial immune systems are triggered by phages, or how the attackers often manage to overcome these defences.
"It's a bit like solving a detective mystery: you have to piece together all the clues in order to understand what a protein does and how it functions. My team is developing new computational tools to do exactly that, which is incredibly exciting!"
Once researchers have clarified how phage proteins interact with bacterial defences, one aim is to modify phages to attack pathogenic bacteria more effectively.
"With this approach the reprogrammed phages can more easily enter the bacterium, overcome its immunity and combat it more effectively," concludes Gemma Atkinson.
