New Antibiotics Discovery

Currently, humanity is facing severe health problem such as infection with multidrug resistant microorganisms. This critical situation requires us not only to identify new classes of antibiotics with novel targets and mechanisms of action. Secondary metabolites of global environmental microbiome are the main source of various antibiotic. However, the antibiotics synthetic potential of most microorganisms remains largely unexplored. Difficulties in discovery of new antibiotics synthesized by microorganisms are associated with the low culturability of them under laboratory conditions.

Microfluidic technique provides an indispensable tool for finding new antibiotics via cultivation of previously unculturable microorganisms. In addition, the combination of fluorescence-activated cell sorting with high-throughput microfluidic realizes examination of antimicrobial potential of environmental microbial community. Fluorescent pathogenic cells are co-cultured with a to-be-screened isogeneic microbe in a droplet. Strains with antipathogenic ability will inhibit the growth of pathogenic cell, or even kill those cells, thereby decreasing the fluorescence intensity of the droplet. Based on the intensity of fluorescence signal, the droplets containing strains with high antipathogenic activity can be separated.

What We Can Do for You

• Cultivation of bacteria under the conditions similar to the sampling environment
• Sorting of stains producing antimicrobial substances with a reporter-inhibition assay
• Identification of antimicrobial substances by HPLC-MS

For more information about our new antibiotics discovery service, please contact us.