Dr. Zhaomin Yang

Seminar Details

Host: Dr. Junjie Zhang

Time: 4:00pm-5:00pm

Location: BICH 108

Seminar Abstract

Antibiotic resistance is an escalating global threat to human health. By targeting essential processes for bacterial viability, conventional antibiotics select for and enrich resistant bacterial populations, driving the inevitable emergence and spread of resistance. Targeting bacterial virulence rather than viability is a promising alternative, as disarming pathogens imposes less selective pressure for resistance. The bacterial type IV pilus (T4P) is a dynamic surface structure and key virulence factor conserved across many priority pathogens, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii. T4P mediates host colonization, biofilm formation, twitching motility, and DNA uptake, and its central role in pathogenesis makes it an attractive antivirulence target. In this seminar, I will present our recent advances on the discovery, validation, and characterization of small-molecule T4P inhibitors. These include the development of high-throughput screens to identify compounds that disrupt T4P assembly and/or function, the orthogonal assays used to validate hits in Pseudomonas and Acinetobacter, and the structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies of one selected inhibitor. Together, these results provide proof of concept for our high-throughput screening platform and lay a foundation for the development of chemotherapeutic agents against multidrug-resistant pathogens.