Using commensals to reduce and or counter antimicrobial resistance (AR). Our current studies aim to use commensal bacteria and their products to decrease AR infections through 3 aims: 1) Systematic testing of human commensals for antimicrobial functions on AR ESKAPE pathogens. 2) Bioinformatics mining for bacterial biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) encoding antimicrobials. 3) Determine the identity of antimicrobial/antibiofilm substances using HPLC, proteomics and NMR.
Development bacteriophage therapies against Streptococcus pneumoniae. One of the biggest limitations of the conjugate vaccines and naturally obtained phages is that they are both serotype- and strain-specific, mostly due to targeting the variable components of the S. pneumoniae polysaccharide capsule and teichoic acids, respectively. Our goal is to target conserved outer membrane proteins (OMPs) of Strep for entry of engineered phages to infect and replicate and in doing so, kill the Strep pathogen.