Diversity-Oriented Synthesis and Chemical Genetics of New Antibacterials

The common theme of the research that this fellowship and research grant will support concerns the development of new approaches and techniques to discover biologically active small molecules, such as antibiotics and other drugs. There are two particular aspects of the new approaches that we will concentrate upon: 1. diversity-oriented synthesis, and 2. 3-D small molecule microarraying technology. Diversity-oriented synthesis is a new concept in organic synthesis, where the aim is to synthesise collections of structurally-diverse small molecules efficiently. We will perform a diversity-oriented synthesis to give products with the highest range of structural diversity to date. As structural diversity is somewhat subjective, we will also develop software to analyse collections of small molecules. The compounds that we make will be tested for their ability to kill bad bacteria. 3-D Small molecule microarrays are glass microscope slides (25 x 75 mm) that have thousands of separate polymer spots on the top surface, which contain small molecules at each spot. As each individual spot has a different compound attached to it, they can be used to test all of the small molecules at the same time. This is a highly efficient way of testing so many compounds at once on such a small scale. We will pioneer new methodology in this area to overcome existing problems such as signal-to-noise and surface effects.The fellowship will also allow the completion of other approaches we are researching in synthetic methodology and synthesis of potential new antibiotics, such as the synthesis of lipid A analogues and quorum sensing modulators.