Two University of Tartu researchers received prestigious European research grants to tackle major bottlenecks in healthcare

Hedvig Tamman, Associate Professor in Genetics, and Uku Vainik, Associate Professor of Behavioural Genetics at the University of Tartu, received the Starting Grant from the European Research Council. Tamman focuses in her research project on the arms race between bacteria and bacterial viruses, and Vainik on identifying the links between obesity-related genetic and behavioural factors.

The arms race between bacteria and bacterial viruses 

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Antibiotic resistance is an ever-growing problem in the treatment of infectious diseases caused by bacteria. Studying the two-way defence mechanisms of bacteria and bacterial viruses, or phages, can offer a new solution to the problem. Antibiotics activate a defence mechanism, which puts the bacterium into a kind of hibernation. This helps the bacterium survive the antibiotic attack and supports the development and spread of resistance. This is where phages can help by paralysing the bacterial defence mechanism.

“As bacteria and phages have co-evolved since the beginning of time, there is a kind of arms race between them – phages develop a mechanism to overcome all the bacterial defence systems. This can give us ideas on how to fight bacterial diseases in the future,” Hedvig Tamman said about her project.

Behavioural causes of weight change variability and the genetic lottery 

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In the project led by Uku Vainik, the researcher studies behavioural and genetic links to obesity and aims to identify possible new interventions to combat obesity. Obesity is a hereditary chronic disease affecting nearly one billion people worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, just over half of the human population will be overweight or obese by 2030. Given the health problems that accompany obesity, this is a huge additional burden on healthcare systems and requires rapid and effective solutions.

Vainik tries to understand what factors might be more broadly predictive of weight loss, whether the predictive factors have a causal relationship with weight loss success, and whether weight loss programmes can be made more effective by understanding this relationship. In the research, they use machine learning, health data collected in gene banks and a mobile app that supports health behaviour. 

The European Research Council’s (ERC) Starting Grant for early-stage researchers is €1.5 million for a period of five years. Hedvig Tamman’s project “Deciphering stringent response proteins and toxin-antitoxin systems in the arms race between bacteria and phages” (abbreviation PhaBacArms) will start at the beginning of 2024 and run until the end of 2028. Uku Vainik’s project “Mapping the behavioural causes of weight change variability with genetic lottery” (abbreviation OBECAUSE) will begin in 2024.