Quorum sensing

Alex Yashkin, Chemistry, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel
Josep Rayo, Chemistry, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel
Michael M. Meijler, Chemistry, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel


In recent years the world has seen a troubling increase in antibiotic resistance among many kinds of bacteria, especially in hospitals. Certain notorious pathogens have gained resistance against most known antibiotics. An alternative approach to treat and / or prevent bacterial infections is to target the bacterial communication mechanisms, also known as quorum sensing, that enable bacteria to collaborate with one another. Bacteria sense each other with the help of secreted small molecules (autoinducers) and receptor proteins that bind these compounds, and this way they assess their population density and regulate virulence accordingly. Our aim is to attain a deep molecular understanding of these processes through synthesis of modified autoinducers. By using such probes we aim to target specific receptors and also discover unknown proteins that are part of the QS regulon.

In Pseudomonas aeruginosa one of the autoinducers is N-butyryl-L-homoserine lactone (C4-HSL), we modified the core structure of this compound to introduce a photoactive group and a ‘click’ tag, in order to covalently bind C4-HSL binding proteins. We currently fine tune our chemical proteomics platform to the use of this probe in unraveling part of the P. aeruginosa QS network.