In Our Way to Progress
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to proceed with the investigation, given that all the cultures of the fungus we intend to study got severely contaminated. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that we have done nothing in the past month. Our focus has been on literature revision and experimental design. So far we have conducted three journal clubs; all of them specifically related to our project. I had the opportunity to conduct one of the journal clubs, and even though I didn’t performed as I would like, at least I had the experience. I will focus on learning from my mistakes in order to have a better performance when the next opportunity shows up. It is for this reason that will attribute our progress with a 3 (scale of 5).
Thankfully a few days ago we received the good news from one of our lab partners that a person that works in the Darlington provided us with a fresh culture of the desired fungus. This means that the month of March is going to be very intense and hopefully I will be sharing some of the findings on the next post.
Here is a summary of our project:
Our project is focused on the design and characterization of engineered materials with intrinsic antifungal activity. We have chosen beta-peptides as a platform for the synthesis of target-specific antifungal agents. The already studied molecular interactions of antimicrobial synthetic peptides with cell membranes of pathogenic fungi and bacteria provide an excellent start point from which to optimize our designs. We propose the utilization of chitin-binding domains (CBDs) as models to create target-specific beta-peptides. CBDs are short amino acid sequences that bind specifically to the N-acetyl glucosamine subunits of the structural biopolymer chitin. We hypothesize that since chitin is a specific structural component of fungal cell walls, a CBD-based beta-peptide will exhibit an enhanced antifungal activity and decrease cytotoxicity particularly in mammalian cells, which lack chitin as a structural component. We will synthesize and characterize CBD-based beta-peptides and assess their activity against fungal cells in vitro using the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, an important human pathogen. Furthermore, we will characterize the in vivo activity of CBD-based beta peptides using the murine pathogenesis model for cryptococcosis.
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