Scientists Turn Bacterial Molecules into Potential Drug Molecules

    Scientists have figured out how to turn bacterial molecules into potential drug molecules.   Scientists at Syracuse University say they have created molecules that mimic and dominate toxic ones secreted by bacteria. They believe that these molecules might be turned into potential drugs.

    “Using toxic molecules to develop therapeutic agents, such as a vaccine, is not easy,” explains Yan-Yeung Luk, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry “We’re just beginning to understand how some molecules, synthetic or naturally occurring, control the activities of bacteria. This will help us develop, among other things, drugs with many different applications.”

    The Luk Research Group, which published its study (“Chemical Signals of Synthetic Disaccharide Derivatives Dominate Rhamnolipids at Controlling Multiple Bacterial Activities”) in ChemBioChem, is focusing its attention on Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a microbe that causes many diseases and illnesses, including cystic fibrosis. Like other bacteria, P. aeruginosa produces a range of molecules that guides various activities. Among these molecules are rhamnolipids, which are made up of rhamnose sugar rings and fatty acids, and are able to reduce the surface tension of water. While rhamnolipids have been studied for decades, scientists don’t really know how they affect bacterial behavior.

    Dr. Luk and his colleagues design molecules that control such behavior. Their latest creation is a class of molecules called synthetic disaccharide derivatives (DSDs), which take over the chemical signaling of rhamnolipids to control activities such as biofilm formation, bacterial adhesion, and swarming motility.

    The team also discovered a subset of DSDs that dominates the function of rhamnolipids and has demonstrated capacity for a range of new, unexpected bioactivities. The latter includes phenotypic switching, in which bacteria abandon their original phenotypes to change into two different phenotypes, and bacterial adhesion, considered the first step in colonization and biofilm formation.

    “Biologists know how rhamnopilids are made by bacteria, and can knock out their production, but they don’t fully understand how rhamnolipids work, specifically, how they control different types of bacterial activities,” continues Dr. Luk.

    In addition to being nontoxic and biodegradable, rhamnolipids can withstand extreme temperatures, salinity and acidity. As a result, they have many useful chemical and biological properties. Dr. Luk says that developing rhamnolipids into therapeutic agents has been speculated about for years, but without successful results. He hopes his group’s synthetic approach is the exception. After designing and synthesizing two chemical libraries of molecules, Dr. Luk’s third one contained two DSDs whose structures dominated the functions of rhamnolipids, offering the potential for many applications. It is from these two molecules that Dr. Luk’s team is making new ones.

    “By determining the important structural features of DSDs, we’ve figured out how to control the behavior of P. aeruginosa,” adds Dr. Luk. “At the same time, DSDs have enabled a series of novel biological phenomena that are starting to reveal how rhamnolipids work, something that has baffled scientists for a long time. It’s exciting to be on the brink of discovery.”