Breaking the armour of antimicrobial resistance: Rational design of antimicrobial peptides based on molecular-level understanding of their mechanisms

The issue of antibacterial resistance is one that will have wide reaching impact on the modern world. Bacteria are developing resistance to the antibiotics currently being used which will increase mortality rates and increase the number of complications as a result of surgeries. A proposed solution is to focus on antimicrobial peptides because of their less selective targeting of bacteria.

This project will enlighten the mechanism of action of a range of antimicrobial peptides with a gram-negative bacteria outer membrane model. Particular focus will be on the aggregation of these peptides within the bilayer rather than the interaction of single peptides and the bilayer. The project will use a mixture of molecular dynamics simulations at the atomistic and coarse-grained scale and atomic force microscopy to achieve this.

The novelty of the project is in the scale of the simulations that can be afforded by the recently developed coarse-grained models which have currently not been rigorously validated or used in conjunction with high concentrations of peptides.