A structural investigation into the action of and resistance to ribosome-targeting antibiotics (360G-Wellcome-203743_Z_16_A)

Antibiotics are crucial to modern medicine, allowing treatment of life-threatening bacterial infections and making many surgeries like transplantations possible. However, pathogenic bacteria are rapidly evolving to resist their effects. Protein synthesis is one of the main antibiotic targets in bacterial cells. I will use structural biology techniques, principally cryoEM and single particle image processing, to understand how both novel natural products and clinical antibiotics bind to the ribosome to bring about their inhibitory effects on protein synthesis. Furthermore, I will investigate the cause of toxicity of certain ribosome-binding antibiotics by examining how they bind to the mammalian mitochondrial ribosome. Finally, I will use a combination of cryoEM and protein X-ray crystallography to elucidate how certain ribosomal-protecting proteins form complexes with the ribosome in order to bring about antibiotic resistance. On an individual level, these studies will allow an assessment of the viability of novel natural products as suitable clinical antibiotics. More generally, they will contribute to our knowledge of how different classes of antibiotics target the ribosomes of pathogenic bacteria, and how these bacteria evolve resistance. This knowledge will help the development of methods to rationally design new ribosome-targeting antibiotics that are able to overcome or circumvent resistance.