Award details

BBSRC Studentship: Engineering novel antimicrobials to target gut pathogens

Reference	BBS/E/F/00042677
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Arjan Narbad
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	Quadram Institute Bioscience
Department	Quadram Institute Bioscience Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	2,985
Status	Current
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/10/2012
End date	30/09/2016
Duration	47 months

Abstract

Because of the rise in multi-drug resistant pathogenic bacteria there is an increasing need to discover and develop new antibiotics. The human gastrointestinal tract is a home to trillions of bacteria that play a key role in the health and disease of both humans and animals. The gut microbiome encodes more than 3 million genes and represents a potential novel source of genes that encode peptides that may be developed as antimicrobials. Using genome mining approaches we have identified several genetic pathways within the bacteria from human gut that may encode such antimicrobial bacteriocin peptides. The aim of this project is to undertake molecular studies to clone and express these genes in laboratory strains of E. coli and Lactic acid bacteria. The peptides produced will be purified and characterised in detail to determine their structures and their effectiveness against different pathogenic bacteria will be examined. Novel bacteriocins will be generated by the genetic engineering of existing gene clusters to produce a new array of synthetic peptides which may have improved activity and host range. In particular we will target the gut pathogens Clostridium difficile that cause hospital acquired diarrheal infections as well as Clostridium perfringens that is a major cause of food poisoning in humans but also causes zoonotic infections in animals.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Microbiology, Pharmaceuticals, Synthetic Biology
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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