Magnetic Resonance Assays for the Identification of Novel Lectin Inhibitors to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance

• Applicant: Dr. Christina Jordan
• Subject Area: Biophysics ; Structural Biology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556493997

In this project, the special properties of fluorine in carbohydrates offers will be exploited in the field of drug discovery using magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Fluorinated carbohydrates are ideal to be employed for NMR-based assays as 19F-NMR reporters: fluorine NMR is extremely sensitive to binding events, and spectral analysis is simple due to the absence of background signals in biological samples. Further, fluorine leads to well-dispersed spectra of carbohydrate ligands, facilitating structure determination of protein-carbohydrate complexes. Based on this, this project will focus on the development of carbohydrate-specific NMR and MRI assays that will simplify affinity determination of the target proteins to their natural binding epitopes. This will lead to the identification of novel drug candidates as inhibitors for carbohydrate-binding proteins, which is particularly important in terms of the emerging threat by antimicrobial resistance. The targeted proteins play key roles in host cell invasion by P. aeruginosa and E. coli, two bacteria that belong to the top five drug-resistant bacteria. The project will be centred on the development of NMR methods and an innovative MRI approach for carbohydrate specific drug discovery to establish a set of powerful and efficient tools in this field. Ultimately, the newly developed methods will lead to the proposal of novel drug candidates that are highly specific for the target proteins and could potentially be used as inhibitors to combat antimicrobial resistance.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Host: Privatdozent Dr. Alvar D. Gossert