Exploring novel antimicrobial bionanomaterials through molecular dynamics simulations and neutron research

抗生素耐药性正迅速成为一项重大的医疗挑战，并成为对人类健康的最大威胁之一，因为世界上只剩下有限数量的有效抗生素。这一研究项目有助于开发新型抗菌肽，作为对抗细菌和真菌耐药性的解决方案。与许多现有的针对细菌细胞壁、蛋白质和遗传分子的抗生素不同，该项目旨在设计和开发抗菌肽，通过对病原体的膜施加物理破坏并导致渗漏来杀死病原体。该项目工作的目标是通过结合实验和计算模型来了解抗菌肽如何与细菌膜相互作用。中子反射和散射结合氚标记在揭示与脂膜和抗菌肽之间相互作用相关的结构特征方面特别强大。该项目属于软物质和生物物理学领域。

Antibiotic resistance is fast becoming a major healthcare challenge and is one of the top threats to human health as only a limited number of effective antibiotics are left in the world. This research project contributes to the development of novel antimicrobial peptides as a solution towards fighting bacterial and fungal resistances. Unlike many existing antibiotics that target bacterial cell walls, proteins and genetic molecules, the antimicrobial peptides this project aims to design and develop, kill pathogens by imposing physical destructions to their membranes and causing leakage. The objectives of the project work are to understand how antimicrobial peptides interact with bacterial membranes by combining experiments and computational modelling. Neutron reflection and scattering combined with deuterium labelling are particularly powerful at unravelling structural features associated with the interactions between lipid membranes and antimicrobial peptides. This project falls in the area of soft mater and biophysics.