Addressing antimicrobial resistance with peptides: novel sactipeptides from genome mining

Antimicrobial resistance is a huge threat to global public health and new compounds are
urgently needed to address this escalating crisis. Bacterial natural products are a vast
reservoir of such compounds. One class of peptidic bacterial natural products with promising
activities and selectivities are the sactipeptides. Several sactipeptides have been predicted in
known bacterial species using genome mining,[1] though only six have been isolated and
characterised to date. The aim of this project is therefore to identify novel sactipeptides from
bacteria, characterise their structure and activity, and investigate the production of
analogues using the sactipeptide biosynthetic machinery.