Team:Nevada

Project Description

Lysesavers: A New Approach to Fighting Bacterial Diseases

A recent approach to combating bacterial pathogens takes advantage of naturally occurring virus proteins known as endolysins, which are toxic to specific bacteria. The use of endolysins has no known resistance formation and relatively little disruption to native flora, making it preferable to antibiotics and harsh chemical treatments. While it has been approved for uses ranging from medicine to food safety, the use of endolysins in agriculture is still an emerging field. Most of the work that has been done using endolysins to fight plant disease focuses on gram-positive bacteria. This is largely due to the fact that gram negative bacteria possess an outer lipid membrane that prevents access to the peptidoglycan layer, which is what endolysins degrade. Our team plans to create antibacterial treatments that can effectively control a wide range of gram-negative plant pathogens by developing a method to disrupt the outer membrane and allow endolysins into the periplasmic space. This new method must be less harmful to plants than the current detergents and chaotropes used to permeabalize outer membranes in vitro. We also aim to develop a system that uses dual fluorescence to easily detect outer membrane disruption. This new system will be critical in ensuring the success of our project, as well as any future studies on the efficacy of gram-negative endolysins.