Congratulations to Anna Lopatina, our postdoctoral fellow at CeMESS, on receiving the FWF-ASTRA Award with the Medical University of Vienna!
Her project will explore the systems-level interactions between bacteriophages and bacterial defense, with implications for engineering phages for therapeutic use.
In her new project, Lopatina will investigate how bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacteria –overcome complex bacterial immunity and how these interactions shape infection outcomes. Moving beyond the traditional view of individual defense–anti-defense pairs, she will uncover how multiple viral countermeasures cooperate, interact, and are dynamically regulated to neutralize sophisticated bacterial immune networks. Her work will provide the first systems-level understanding of how viruses adapt to complex bacterial immunity, addressing one of the central questions in host–virus biology. Beyond advancing our understanding of a molecular arms race that drives microbial evolution across ecosystems, the project will establish new design principles for engineering bacteriophages for therapeutic applications, opening new avenues for combating antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.
FWF/derKnopfdruecker
About Anna Lopatina
Anna received her PhD from the Institute of Gene Biology in Moscow, Russia, where she was awarded several personal research fellowships to support her work, including funding for two expeditions to Antarctica. She subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, where she received a Senior Postdoctoral Award. She then joined the University of Vienna, Austria, as a postdoctoral researcher, where she held a Franziska Seidl Fellowship and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research has contributed to the discovery of bacterial immune systems and viral anti-defense mechanisms, advancing our understanding of bacteria–virus interactions. She looks forward to building on these discoveries through her new project.
About FWF-ASTRA
The FWF-ASTRA programme supports outstanding early-career researchers in Austria with innovative projects that promise high scientific impact.