A short medicinal-chemistry inspired laboratory sequence aimed at understanding and controlling bacterial communication.
Laura Brown, Indiana University-Bloomington
Medicinal chemists are organic chemists (often employed by pharmaceutical companies) who synthesize and develop new organic molecules with favorable biological properties. As an illustrative example, penicillin was discovered in 1928 and developed into a drug in 1942. Resistance quickly arose and continues to be a problem, and penicillin is not effective against all types of bacteria. In the decades that followed, medicinal chemists synthesized a variety of molecules that were similar in structure to penicillin, but that either demonstrated enhanced antibiotic activity or did not exhibit the same resistance profile. A new approach to controlling the pathogenicity of bacteria is to simply "trick" the bacteria into remaining in their "normal" non-pathogenic state by controlling the ability of bacteria to communicate with one another by a mechanism termed "Quorum Sensing." Quorum sensing is a form of chemical communication by which bacteria sense each other's presence via concentration gradients of small molecules. I have a collaborator in the biology department who has developed a biochemical assay to identify inhibitors of this process, and the students who sign up for this course will synthesize a small library of molecules to test in this assay.