Authors:
Eric Brown is a Professor whose long-standing research interest is in the complex biology that underlies bacterial survival strategies. He and his research team ultimately aim to subvert these systems in drug resistant superbugs and contribute fresh directions for new antibiotics. They are using high throughput tools of chemical biology and molecular genetics to probe poorly understood aspects of bacterial physiology. Indeed, his research group has made important advances in recent years developing avante-garde chemical screening assays that have yielded exciting new probes of bacterial cell systems.
Athanasios Typas is a group leader at EMBL. His group develops and utilizes automated high-throughput approaches to quantitatively assess gene-gene, gene-drug and drug-drug interactions in many different bacterial species and at multiple levels. The large-scale data are then used to gain insights into the evolution of bacterial cellular networks, determine how bacteria interact with their environment and with each other, and to dissect how they assemble and grow their envelope.
Reference:
Curr Opin Microbiol. 2015 Oct;27:viii-ix. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2015.09.007. Epub 2015 Oct 20.