From structural and functional studies of essential and novel lipopolysaccharide transport and assembly membrane proteins to novel drug discoveries combating emerging multidrug-resistant pathogenic bacteria

Grantholders

  • Prof Changjiang Dong

    University of East Anglia

Project summary

Antibiotics are the most successful medicines for controlling bacterial infections. However, bacteria adopt different mechanisms to gain drug resistance, which is becoming a huge global health problem. Multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacterial infections are more difficult to control than those of Gram-positive bacteria, as the Gram-negative bacteria have an additional membrane, the outer membrane, protecting the bacteria from the antibiotics. Lipopolysaccharide is a main component of the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, and is essential for the vitality of most Gram-negative bacteria and plays an essential role in drug resistance. Professor Dong will be using multidisciplinary approaches to investigate the molecular mechanisms of how membrane protein complexes of Gram-negative bacteria build up the outer membrane, with the goal of the development of novel antibiotics against multidrug-resistant bacterial infections.