Publications by authors named "Julia P Deisinger"

Article Synopsis
  • Bacterial pathogens need to bypass host immune defenses and nutrient limitations to cause infections, making the use of human serum a promising medium for discovering new antibacterial drugs.
  • A recent high-throughput screen using human serum revealed compounds that not only inhibited bacterial growth but also enhanced it, particularly synthetic siderophores that help bacteria acquire iron.
  • The most effective compound, a synthetic siderophore combined with the antibiotic aztreonam, led to the creation of MLEB-22043, a broad-spectrum antibiotic that shows improved efficacy against resistant bacteria when paired with a β-lactamase inhibitor.
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In the search for much-needed new antibacterial chemical matter, a myriad of compounds have been reported in academic and pharmaceutical screening endeavors. Only a small fraction of these, however, are characterized with respect to mechanism of action (MOA). Here, we describe a pipeline that categorizes transcriptional responses to antibiotics and provides hypotheses for MOA.

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The rapid rise of multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria has once again caused bacterial infections to become a global health concern. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), also known as host defense peptides (HDPs), offer a viable solution to these pathogens due to their diverse mechanisms of actions, which include direct killing as well as immunomodulatory properties (e.g.

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Lantibiotics are ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) characterized by the presence of lanthionine or methyllanthionine rings and their antimicrobial activity. Cacaoidin, a novel glycosylated lantibiotic, was isolated from a Streptomyces cacaoi strain and fully characterized by NMR, mass spectrometry, chemical derivatization approaches and genome analysis. The new molecule combines outstanding structural features, such as a high number of d-amino acids, an uncommon glycosylated tyrosine residue and an unprecedented N,N-dimethyl lanthionine.

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The Gram-positive cell wall consists of peptidoglycan functionalized with anionic glycopolymers, such as wall teichoic acid and capsular polysaccharide (CP). How the different cell wall polymers are assembled in a coordinated fashion is not fully understood. Here, we reconstitute Staphylococcus aureus CP biosynthesis and elucidate its interplay with the cell wall biosynthetic machinery.

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Unlabelled: Persisters are dormant variants that form a subpopulation of cells tolerant to antibiotics. Persisters are largely responsible for the recalcitrance of chronic infections to therapy. In Escherichia coli, one widely accepted model of persister formation holds that stochastic accumulation of ppGpp causes activation of the Lon protease that degrades antitoxins; active toxins then inhibit translation, resulting in dormant, drug-tolerant persisters.

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