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."
