Tobias Bollenbach
Papers
1
Total Citations
84
H-Index
1
About
Tobias Bollenbach is a leading figure in systems and evolutionary biology, whose research bridges quantitative genetics, microbiology, and biophysics to understand how bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics. His major contributions center on the role of epistasis—the non-additive interactions between genes—in shaping evolutionary trajectories. In his highly cited 2020 work, Bollenbach and his team used massively parallel laboratory evolution to demonstrate that epistasis can actively constrain the evolution of antibiotic resistance. By systematically mapping how genetic perturbations interact with subsequent adaptive mutations, they revealed that the genetic background of a bacterial population can either facilitate or block the emergence of resistance, offering a mechanistic explanation for why some resistance pathways are rarely observed in nature. This work, which has garnered 84 citations, provides a powerful framework for predicting evolutionary outcomes and designing strategies to slow resistance development. Bollenbach’s research has profound implications for combating the global antibiotic resistance crisis, and his innovative integration of high-throughput experiments with theoretical modeling has established him as a key voice in the field of evolutionary systems biology.
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