NPBactID - Differential binding of peptoid functionalized nanoparticles to bacteria for identifying specific strains

A rising public health crisis is antimicrobial resistance (AMR). A key mitigation strategy is to prescribe only the most appropriate antibiotics to reduce the off-targeting that leads to resistance. However, current methods to identify the cause of infection are generally laboratory-based and slow. Convenient, synthetic strain-specific affinity probes (SAPs) could in principle enable rapid, point- of-care biosensors but these are lacking in particular for identifying different strains of bacteria. This project will investigate a novel approach for developing SAPs by exploiting recent results from the host group showing that varying the functionalization directions and densities of antimicrobial "peptoids" immobilized on material surfaces can generate large differences in the surface attachment of different bacteria. Combined with the expertise of the postdoctoral researcher in nanoparticle (NP) synthesis and surface functionalization, this project will develop peptoid functionalized NPs as a novel SAP platform that can generate unique signals when the particles bind to different bacterial strains. We envision that this principle of differential surface functionalization combined with NP encoding can be adapted to a range of biosensing approaches, and thus open a new horizon in bacterial identification to help combat AMR.