Inactive

The referenced equipment is necessary in order to continue the research of the NIDCR. The Microbial Therapeutics Unit (MTU) is interested in understanding the function of microbial communities and how... The referenced equipment is necessary in order to continue the research of the NIDCR. The Microbial Therapeutics Unit (MTU) is interested in understanding the function of microbial communities and how they can be explored for therapeutic purposes. Historically, natural products derived from microbes have been a rich source of potent antimicrobial therapeutics. However, discovery from environmental sources has lagged and shifted to synthetic libraries in recent years, under the assumption that microbial-derived therapeutic discovery has been exhausted. On the other hand, genomics data and computational models have revealed that environmental microbiomes have far greater capacity to produce antimicrobials than was initially observed from traditional screening techniques. This discrepancy is due to the inability to cultivate over 99% of environmental-dwelling microbes. Therefore, new approaches that circumvent the limitation of microbial cultivation will be invaluable. Thus, the MTU proposes to use single cell microfluidics to capture and characterize potential antibiotics-producing microbes in high-throughput and identify corresponding genes responsible for antimicrobial activity. However, due to harsh lysis requirement of some bacteria, traditional single cell tools are unsuitable for microbial analysis. To overcome this, the MTU is interested in a system which performs multi-step workflows while maintaining compartmentalization of single microbial cells.