Johannes Cairns, Collegium Researcher and Group Leader at the Turku Collegium for Science, Medicine and Technology, arrives at WCMM Lund as the latest DDLS Fellow. Currently, Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku's Department of Biology and affiliated with the Finnish Multidisciplinary Center of Excellence in Antimicrobial Resistance Research (FIMAR), Cairns brings expertise in laboratory-guided evolution, genetic engineering, and bioinformatics to tackle antibiotic resistance and microbial community resilience.
We had the chance to interview him to know more about his past and future with us as a new WCMM member!
What excites you most about coming to Lund and starting your DDLS fellowship? How does your move fit with your long term research vision?
- "What excites me most about the DDLS fellowship is the opportunity to build an independent, data-driven research program that connects experimental microbiology with infection biology and quantitative analysis. In the long term, my aim is to move from general laboratory systems toward clinically grounded models that can explain and help predict how antimicrobial resistance and community resilience are influenced by colonization, infection, and treatment contexts. Being hosted at WCMM provides a strong infection biology environment in which this trajectory can be developed and connected to clinically relevant questions."
Your lab uses experimental evolution and genomics to study antibiotic resistance. In simple terms, how do you “speed up evolution” in the lab and what kinds of practical insights might this provide for clinicians and public health agencies?
-"We “speed up evolution” by growing bacteria for many generations under defined conditions and tracking population change over time, allowing us to observe dynamics over weeks rather than years. This produces quantitative, time-resolved insight into how resistance emerges and persists across different ecological and treatment contexts."
As a new group leader in the DDLS program, are there specific collaborations in Lund or SciLifeLab you are especially looking forward to?
-"I’m particularly looking forward to collaborations that link controlled experiments to clinically relevant questions, such as gut colonization by resistant strains and polymicrobial infection dynamics. Lund’s infection research environment, together with SciLifeLab’s genomics and data-science infrastructure, provides excellent opportunities to integrate experiments with high-resolution measurement and data science."
You have developed and worked on multispecies synthetic communities. Why study antimicrobial resistance in community contexts?
-"Although many infections are single-species, antibiotic exposure often acts on microbial communities, particularly in the gut, which serve as reservoirs for resistant strains and genes and can seed infections such as polymicrobial urinary tract infections. Antibiotic-driven changes in communities shape both resistance and community functioning, with important repercussions for infection persistence and host health. Studying resistance and resilience together in community contexts helps clarify how these outcomes jointly emerge under antibiotic pressure."
Thank you Johannes for the opportunity to have this interview and good luck with your research!
Read more
- Johannes Cairns DDLS Fellow | Microbial Evolutionary Genetics
- MEG Lab at Turku
