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

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.