Anaerobic workstation/Station de travail anaérobie

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During the past 20 years, bacterial resistance to antibiotics has become a major problem which is recognized by the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control and Health Canada. This situation is partly because today's antibiotics are mainly based on a limited selection of chemical scaffolds, which makes it easier for bacterial pathogens to quickly develop resistance against new drug derivatives through mutations or gene transfer. The anaerobic pathogen Clostridium difficile has dramatically increased the hospital-associated deaths in recent years due to the spreading of the high toxin-producing strains, leaving currently little therapeutic solutions. Another anaerobic pathogen Clostridium perfringens causes significant human health problems (gas gangrene) and important economic losses for the Canadian poultry industry. Our laboratories aim at discovering new targets in these two pathogens for the development of drugs that would be devoid of toxicity for human or animal cells. Burrus' laboratory studies the production and degradation of intracellular messenger molecules that are unique to bacteria and are important for the adaptation of microorganisms in response to alteration of the environmental conditions. Malouin's laboratory explores a novel class of antibiotic molecules called "antibioswitch" that target the expression of genes important for the synthesis of a key component of the bacterial cell. Sirois's laboratory is developing innovative spectroscopic system for online monitoring of cell physiology that will now be adapted to anaerobic bacteria. Since C. difficile and C. perfringens cannot be cultivated in the presence of oxygen, all experimentation on these two pathogens has to be carried out in a controlled anaerobic atmosphere. The acquisition of the anaerobic workstation that will be shared by our three laboratories will allow us to develop these projects, help us attract quality students interested by emerging anaerobic pathogens and train highly qualified personnel to molecular methods and procedures in anaerobe microbiology.