An FSU team will screen soil microbes from around the world, including some extreme environments, in search of sources of new antibacterial drugs to counter the looming threat of drug-resistant bacteria. “People have been searching for new antibiotics for many years, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to discover novel compounds. Our goal is to revolutionize the drug discovery pipeline,” says Xiangpeng Li.
Li’s special microfluidics system will speedily process tens of thousands of droplets from those samples at one time. Then a team at the MagLab will use its mass spectrometers to identify bioactive molecules from promising microbes. “We’re looking for signals that have not been discovered before. We don’t want to rediscover penicillin … we annotate the molecular composition of each signal and compare it against databases of known compounds.”
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