Antimicrobials kill or halt harmful microbes. The most common class, antibiotics, once turned lethal infections into routine cases, but only a few new antibiotics have appeared since 1987. Meanwhile, bacteria keep evolving, making many existing drugs unreliable. Without new and practical options, deaths from resistant infections are projected to climb steeply in the coming decades. A promising alternative is antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are short protein molecules that can create holes in bacterial cells, block vital processes, or boost our immune response. Machine-learning tools have already predicted hundreds of potent AMPs. However, assessing how quickly bacteria might learn to resist them remains challenging.
To meet this need, we will build an automated, high-throughput resistance test (“iAMR”) that lets a liquid-handling robot challenge bacteria with low, repeated doses of 28 new AMP-bacterium pairs over 21 days while measuring growth every 30 minutes. Samples from each time-point are frozen for future DNA and RNA sequencing to reveal exactly how resistance, if any, appears.
Results will be used directly in Amphoraxe’s AMP development pipeline, help regulators judge long-term efficacy, and provide an open-source protocol that other labs can adopt. In short, the project aims to fast-track safer peptide antibiotics and keep Canada ahead in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.
Keywords: antimicrobial resistance, antimicrobial peptides, automated liquid handling, high-throughput screening, iAMR