Development of new weapon against bacterial infection: Idenfication and production of new antimicrobial compounds and establishment of loading strategy by Graphene-coated nanoparticles

Research Project, 2021 – 2024

Antibiotics is the main weapon used to fight infection caused by pathogenic microbes. Due to the spread of the antibiotic resistance genes, current antibiotics are not effectively enough to treat infection caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and therefore microbes caused infection is still one of the main causes for human death. Over several decades, numerous soil microbes had been screened for antibiotics. Therefore, application of traditional screening strategies tend to rediscover those compounds already known, which is so true that there is no new antibiotics been discovered in the past 30 years. Traditional strategies require the cultivation of microbes in laboratory conditions. However, most environmental microbes are uncultivated and therefore from which it has a great potential to discover new antibiotics.

We aim to:

•Genome mining for new antimicrobial compounds biosynthetic genes based on a novel evolutionary approach - phylostratigraphy;

•Identification and production of new antimicrobial compounds in microbial cell factory;

•Development of loading strategy of antimicrobial compounds with Graphene-coated nanoparticles.

 Project seminars and project reports will be held regularly. We will also organize workshops, conferences, and provide lectures, courses, master theses, and internships for both Swedish and Chinese parties. The research results are expected to lead to 3 - 5 publications.

By achievement of aims, we will

•provide new strategies for antimicrobial compounds development and therapy;

•unlock a tremendous potential for understanding the molecular tenets of life, as well as for biomedical and biotechnology applications;

•promote interdisciplinary research and education by combination of molecular biology, physics, material science and nanotechnology.