QUANTITATIVE LIFE SCIENCES GUEST SEMINAR - 19 November

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

QUANTITATIVE LIFE SCIENCES GUEST SEMINAR

Thursday, 19 November - 11:00 am
Meeting Room, 2nd Floor- ICTP, old SISSA Building

Guest speaker: Dr. Giulia Runti
                             Antimicrobial Peptides Laboratory
                             Department of Life Sciences, University of 
Trieste


Title: "Fighting antibiotic resistance with antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) "


Abstract:

   An increasing number of bacterial pathogens are acquiring multi-drug 
resistance (MDR) to different classes of antibiotics, with certain types 
of Gram-negative bacteria, such as Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas 
aeruginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae, becoming a general health threat. 
Therefore new drugs are urgently needed to reduce the risk of dangerous 
and costly infections, and antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) represent a 
valuable candidate as new antimicrobials. AMPs are an important 
component of the innate immune system, possessing both antimicrobial and 
immune-modulatory effects, and are produced among all the living 
kingdoms. They are small and cationic molecules exerting their activity 
mainly disrupting bacterial membranes, despite not all of them act via a 
lytic mechanism of action. Indeed the class of proline-rich peptides 
(PR-AMPs) has been shown to act intracellularly and their mode of action 
has been well characterised in Escherichia coli, relying on the 
inhibition of protein synthesis upon entry into the cell via the 
membrane protein SbmA.
Our efforts are currently devoted to evaluate the activity of the PR-AMP 
Bac7 against clinically relevant bacteria, such as those mentioned 
above, in order to broaden the activity spectrum of the peptide. 
Moreover we are characterising the mechanism of action of Bac7 against 
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, showing that the peptide kills this 
microorganism with a different mode of action with respect to that 
described for Escherichia coli, and we are exploiting RNAseq analysis to 
obtain new insights into the mode action of Bac7 against Salmonella 
typhimurium.

-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
e-mail:qls at ictp.it