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117 - Extremophiles Against Antibiotic Resistance (EAAR)

What this challenge is about

Antibiotic resistance is a threat on the scale of climate change for health and societal development. Antibiotic resistance is due to poorly regulated, widespread usage, compounded by low numbers of new antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance has severe consequences for both life expectancy and quality; the UK recorded increases in cases and deaths to infectious diseases in the last ten years, with similar increases observed globally1. Antibiotic resistance also has implications for recovery from routine medical procedures (e.g., hip replacements)1 and for the global economy, through costs of managing diseases and loss of years1–3. This will worsen inequalities, with antibiotic resistance-related illness most affecting the global south and vulnerable peoples2.

The vision is to develop a toolkit to identify novel antibiotics in extreme environments to use in the fight against antibiotic resistance. Extreme environments harbour unique microbes, but their remoteness and complexity have resulted in them being overlooked and there is a high-potential for novel chemistries and genes to be abundant in non-standard environments4.

The first year of this project will represent a pilot to develop the methodology and screen metabolites from these environments for antimicrobial activity. We will use non-culture-based methods by capturing genes, synthesising, and expressing these in hosts organisms, allowing production of novel metabolites in domesticated lab strains.

1. ESPAUR report 2021 to 2022.
2. Murray, C. J. et al. The Lancet 399, 629–655 (2022).
3. J Roope, L. S. et al. Science (1979) 364, (2019).
4. Qin, Z. et al. Chem Sci 8, 3218–3227 (2017).

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