Alternative targets for Antibiotics, fighting infection with higher specificity

Antibiotic resistant is a global problem that will only increase over time and is further highly relevant for the tuberculosis patients of South Africa. New drug targets and new approaches to develop novel antibiotics are urgently needed. My group develops RNA based drug targets and in the future, we are working on drug targeting these novel identified targets.
We choose to not just look at static structures for drug development, but investigate the dynamical changes of biomolecules, a novel field for drug development.
This project will identify, by sequence alignments, potential target regions and perform structural predictions and dynamic algorithm searches for druggable invisible RNA pockets in the ribosome of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis as well as healthcare-associated infectious bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). This will be the basis for our experimental testing and identification of future RNA based small molecule antibiotics against multidrugresistant pathogenic bacteria.