Experimental and Computational Characterization of Novel Antibiotics Targeting Ribosomal Assembly

Together with Tessa Noonan and Leon Obendorf, I work a project aiming to identify novel antibiotic drugs which inhibit ribosomal assembly in bacteria. The ribosome is a large macromolecular complex consisting of several proteins plus RNA and its primary task is to synthesize new protein in a process which is called Translation. Some broadly used antibiotics inhibit translation and thus can kill the bacteria. However, bacteria became resistant to these antibiotics so we develop new drug molecules which shall inhibit already the assembly of the large ribosome complex by preventing the ribosomal components from interacting with each other. For this, we use methods from computer-aided drug design (docking, virtual screening, MD simulations) and validate them experimentally (bio-layer interferometry, thermal shift assays, isothermal titration calorimetry).