National Institutes of Health supports novel drug discovery research

Approximately $1.7 million in new funding from the National Institutes of Health will enable a multidisciplinary team of University of Illinois at Chicago researchers to build a reference library of bacteria to help scientists quickly identify bacterial strains and analyze their disease-fighting potential.

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Coupled with a novel web-based bioinformatics pipeline, the researchers hope the library, which will not only provide information to help classify bacteria but also will help identify the antibiotics an individual species might produce, will remove years of work from the drug discovery process.

Because the library will be available to the public, researchers will be able to compare their discoveries to the information in the library and contribute their findings to the database.

Metcalf, the G. William Arends Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and professor of microbiology at the U. of I. School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is donating cellular material from the Agricultural Research Service Culture Collection for digitization into the library. The ARS collection, which contains more than 8,000 strains and is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is one of the largest public collections of microorganisms in the world.

"We hope that we can create a more targeted, cost-efficient and accessible approach to microbial drug discovery," Murphy said. "This would be a major innovation to the front end of drug discovery research when scientists need basic information to begin studying microbial strains for disease-fighting properties."