Tools for Natural Product Antibiotic Discovery

The world is facing an impending catastrophe in relation to the emergence of antibiotic resistance across a wide range of infectious diseases. We urgently need to develop new classes of antibiotics, which work in different ways to the old drugs and so are not susceptible to existing resistance mechanisms. Newcastle University’s Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology has world leading researchers studying how bacterial cells work, enabling them to identify weaknesses in their defence mechanisms. Many antibiotics are made by bacteria as part of a natural biological warfare in the soil. Although we have developed very sophisticated ways to identify natural products that act in new ways, they are often made in tiny amounts and mixed in with many unwanted inactive molecules. The equipment requested will enable us to grow the producer organisms on a large scale, to purify the active molecules and identify their chemical structure, dramatically enhancing the chances of finding important new antibiotics and accelerating the rate of progressing them into drugs