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

抗菌素耐药性（AMR）是一个日益严重的公共卫生危机。一个关键的缓解策略是只开最合适的抗生素，以减少导致耐药性的脱靶现象。然而，目前确定感染原因的方法通常以实验室为基础，速度缓慢。方便的、合成的菌株特异性亲和探针（SAPs）原则上可以实现快速的、即时的生物传感器，但它们在识别不同菌株的细菌方面尤其缺乏。本项目将利用宿主群体的最新研究结果，研究一种开发sap的新方法，该方法表明，不同的功能化方向和固定在材料表面的抗菌“类肽”的密度可以产生不同细菌表面附着的巨大差异。结合博士后研究人员在纳米颗粒（NP）合成和表面功能化方面的专业知识，该项目将开发肽类功能化的纳米颗粒作为一种新的SAP平台，当颗粒与不同的细菌菌株结合时，可以产生独特的信号。我们设想，这种结合NP编码的差分表面功能化原理可以适应一系列生物传感方法，从而为细菌鉴定开辟新的视野，以帮助对抗AMR。

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.