Antibiotic resistance: Tracking intracellular pathogens

Antibiotics are one of the most significant achievements in modern medicine. However, an increasing number of pathogens are becoming resistant to them. Some germs evade the antimicrobial effect entirely by hiding inside human cells. Biotechnologist Camilla Ciolli Mattioli is dedicated to studying these intracellular bacteria. Starting in February, she will head a new research group at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg and simultaneously assume a junior professorship at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU).

With her new research group “Systems Microbiology of Intracellular Pathogens”, Mattioli plans to decipher the mechanisms that make intracellular pathogens so resistant. In her research, she will investigate how these microbes, such as Salmonella, survive in host cells, persist, and evade destruction by the immune system.

“This type of bacteria is particularly difficult to combat,” the biotechnologist explains. “By ‘hiding’ in our cells, the germs are protected from both our immune system and many antibiotics.” To understand how this occurs, it is necessary to examine the interactions between the host and the pathogen at the single-cell level and in infection models that are as realistic as possible.

Novel technologies could offer new insights

Thus far, conventional methods have been insufficient to map these complex interactions. This is precisely where the research group of Ciolli Mattioli comes in. At the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI), a site of the Braunschweig Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in cooperation with the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU), she is developing innovative platforms that can simultaneously record the gene expression of host cells and bacteria with single-cell resolution during an infection.

The group combines spatial, temporal, and phenotypic information, using image-based cell sorting and other techniques. Its goal is to identify the molecular switches that determine whether a bacterium will survive, enter a dormant state, or be eliminated by the host.

In the long term, Ciolli Mattioli hopes her research will lead to new approaches for combating antibiotic-resistant infections: “Understanding where bacteria's survival strategies are vulnerable allows us to stop infections in a targeted manner,” she says.

About Camilla Ciolli Mattioli

Camilla Ciolli Mattioli studied biotechnology at the University of Florence (Italy) and received her PhD from the Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany) in 2019. During her doctoral research at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center, she focused on the mechanisms driving RNA localization and local translation in eukaryotic cells. She then won a Marie-Curie fellowship and joined the lab of Roi Avraham at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel) as a postdoctoral fellow, where she investigated how bacterial phenotypic heterogeneity affects infection outcomes. Starting in February 2026, she will be a research group leader at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) and a junior professor at the University of Würzburg.

Further information about the “Systems Microbiology of Intracellular Pathogens” research group