FIU’s Fenfei Leng is part of a team working to develop a high-throughput screening method to identify compounds that can poison bacterial DNA gyrase, an enzyme that bacteria need to survive. Scientists have been designing antibiotics (such as Fluoroquinolones) to attack DNA gyrase for years. But as antibiotic resistance has increased, researchers have been searching for new DNA gyrase poisons.

“Because gyrase poisons are very rare, we hope to discover new classes of them that can be developed into future antibiotics,” says Leng. “A High-Throughput Screening method allows us to rapidly identify these rare gyrase poisons from libraries containing thousands or millions of compounds.” While testing their new method, the team identified Pyr-AMC, a compound that could provide a starting point for developing future antibiotics.

• Fenfei Leng