Duhita Sant, PhD

My research focuses on how microbial communities shape the evolution of bacteria and bacteriophages. In my PhD, I demonstrated that communities drive phage evolution by selecting for broad host-range phages. During my first postdoc at Oxford, I explored how environmental stress, such as pH, affects coevolutionary dynamics within natural bacterial communities, finding that these communities exhibit resilience to such perturbations. Now, in Dr. Manhart’s lab, I study how spatial dynamics, and interspecies interactions shape evolutionary processes in communities of P. aeruginosa and S. aureus in cystic fibrosis by examining the impact of these interactions on mutant fitness, using transposon-insertion mutants as proxies for loss-of-function mutations.