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The beast and its Achilles heel:
A novel target to fight multi-resistant pathogenic bacteria
Created by Wordle
Target: c-di-AMP
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 antibiotics are now losing their old time glory: Bacteria 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 each subteam, for detailed information, please click the icon on the right panel
first, we have built two screening systems, which could be applied in novel-drug screening. With this system, the level of c-di-AMP in the cell can be visualized and measured
We also looked into the diadenylate cyclase(DAC), which can be a great novel target for new antibiotics. We have expressed the truncated DAC(the catalytical domain) from Listeria monocytogenes in E.coli, characterized and crystallized it and finally got a STRUCTURE.
We searched for the genes effect by the level of c-di-AMP and we found ydaO.We identified the Ribo-Switch upstream ydaO and used it directly in our screening system.
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 University Goettingen, in the Microbiology department. 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.
