MSE-Award for Daniel Kaplan

Daniel Kaplan, MSc (AG Horz) has received the MSA-Master Award 2025 for his master thesis entitled „Harnessing T7 Bacteriophage for the delivery of a conjugative CRISPR-Cas9 plasmid in order to re-sensitize Escherichia coli in planktonic and biofilm cultures“. The profile area Molecular Science and Engineering (MSE) is one of eight profile areas at the RWTH and comprises the disciplines of chemistry, biology, process engineering, medicine and mechanical engineering. In view of the increasingly worrying situation of the antibiotic crisis, Daniel Kaplan pursued in his project a highly topical and innovative approach. The key concept was the reversal of antibiotic resistance in multi-drug-resistant strains of Escherichia coli. To this end, the student re-purposed the bacteriophage T7 as vector to carry a conjugative plamid containing the CRISPR-Cas system with the specific feature to interfere with the carbapenemase gene bla_OXA-48. His work was quite complex yet remarkably successful even under harsh conditions like bacterial biofilms, were transduction along with drug re-sensitization was achieved. With his excellent master thesis, Daniel Kaplan showed his enthusiasm and talent for addressing challenging scientific questions. His results show, that drug resistance and dissemination can be reduced by phage-driven strategies of gene inactivation. His work is part of a manuscript, currently in preparation for submission to a renowned peer-reviewed international journal with Daniel Kaplan as coauthor.