Since the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928, antibiotics have marked a major victory of mankind in the battle against infectious diseases. However, after 90 years, the available antibiotics are losing their old time glory: Bacteria can rapidly acquire resistance against antibiotics and become unbridled.
We should have better control over the use of antibiotics, meanwhile, we need to develop new ones, which can sufficiently eliminate the invaders without hurting the "good" bacteria. Therefore, c-di-AMP, an important, recently discovered signaling molecule in Gram-positive bacteria, has come to our sight.
Our project is aimed at finding a way to fight against multi-resistant bacteria by targeting c-di-AMP. We made three different approaches, each approach was accomplished by a subteam, for detailed information, please click the icon on the right panel.
Reporter Team: development of reporter system which visualize the level of c-di-AMP
Array Team: search for genes in B. substils whose expression level is effected by c-di-AMP
DAC Team: characterisation of diadenylate cyclase(DAC), the enzyme which turns ATP to c-di-AMP.
After over 3 month of work, we have finally wrapped up. To know more details about our lab work, please visit Our Lab Book.
We conducted all our work on the North Campus of the Goettingen University in the Department of General Microbiology. All work was done in our S1 level lab. We follow strickly the safety S1 instructions. To know more about safety issues, please visit our safety page.