Welcome to volume 2 of our Researcher Live series on Peptide Therapeutics: disease screening and drug design (links to Vol. 1 recordings below) ! Sign up here to receive email reminders for this collection!
Join our first episode on 14th September at 4pm BST / 3pm GMT with Dr Orode Aniejurengho.
What are we going to talk about in this episode?
Bacteria continually develop antibiotic resistance, this can be made worse by the development of biofilms whereby bacteria form sessile aggregates, making clinical treatment more difficult. Thus, it is important to continue seeking alternative and or complementary antimicrobial strategies.
Dendrons are nanostructured hyperbranched peptide compounds, they have a core and multiple branching connections with versatile reactive terminals. These compounds have multiple applications cutting across cancer research, cell culture, and more recently antimicrobials. We can modify their chemistry to suit the needs of different applications. This study focused on the synthesis of dendrons that could bind bacteriophage DNA as a first step towards the design of a dual-action antimicrobial against bacterial biofilms.
Dendrons and bacteriophages (viruses that specifically target and kill bacteria) have already shown the ability to reduce and prevent the formation of biofilms. However, bacteriophages need to first be isolated, and can have storage and reisolating limitations. This study has focused on analysing the ability of the synthesised dendron, which was previously shown to be able to penetrate bacterial cells, to condense bacteriophage DNA. Additionally for the DNA to retain replicative and antibacterial ability within the bacterial cells. We show that there is potential for dendrons to be applied in DNA delivery and or as antimicrobials.
Series programme:
- 14th September at 4pm BST / 3pm GMT - ‘Exploring hyperbranched peptide compounds in antimicrobial research’ with Dr Orode Aniejurengho, University of Essex Online
- Date and time in September TBC - ‘Engineering novel beta-hairpin peptide therapeutics’ with Dr Priyanka Lahiri, Tufts University
- 12th October, 10am BST/9am GMT – BioSAXS – A Method To Accelerate And De-risk Antimicrobial Drug Development with Dr Kai Hilpert, St George's, University of London
If you'd like to present at your own Researcher Live event, please email kristine.lennie@researcher-app.com
Please find the recording of our Peptide Therapeutics: disease screening and drug design Vol 1 series here:
A Killer solution for vaginal candidiasis: New generation of antifungal peptides with Dr Miguel Fernández de Ullivarri, APC Microbiome Institute
Peptide Hydrogel and Nanotubes for Drug Delivery and Biomaterial Applications with Dr Garry Laverty, Senior Lecturer at Queen’s University in Belfast
04:00 pm BST / 03:00 pm GMT
Dr Orode Aniejurengho, University of Essex Online
Dr Orode Aniejurengho is an associate lecturer of Science at The Open University. During and after her PhD, Orode’s research interests focused on the development of diverse peptide-based compounds for applications in tissue engineering, oncology and as antimicrobials.
DOI: j5zqrqsmPxoW2tfkEAFR_prepost_1
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