Dr. Siân Owen, a Principal Investigator and Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, has been awarded a highly competitive five-year, $1.97 million Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
The award, Mechanisms of Bacterial Defense Against Conjugative Plasmids and Their Phages, will support research into how bacteria defend themselves against the mobile genetic elements that spread antibiotic resistance. The project will investigate how bacteria detect and block conjugative plasmids, which frequently carry antibiotic resistance genes, as well as the specialized viruses that infect plasmid-bearing bacteria.
By revealing the molecular mechanisms that naturally limit the spread of antibiotic resistance genes, this research will deepen our understanding of bacterial evolution and could inform future strategies to slow the emergence and dissemination of drug-resistant infections, a growing public health challenge in New York State and worldwide.