Poster Presentation Royal Australian Chemical Institute National Congress 2026

Development of polysaccharide-based inhibitors of bacterial motility (#533)

Raihan Uz Zaman 1 , Huynh Tam Mihn Nguyen 1 , Tamim Mosaiab 1 , Oren Cooper 1 , Christopher J. Day 1 , Milton J. Kiefel 1 , Victoria Korolik 1 , Todd A. Houston 1
  1. Institute for Biomedicine & Glycomics, GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY, QLD, Australia

Antimicrobial drug resistance is an ever-increasnig problem in modern medical care. Sublethal chemotherapy of bacterial infections can select for resistant organisms allowing drug resistant strains to flourish. Our approach to overcome this is to target bacterial motility in order to prevent infection without killing the bacteria. As a model infectious organism, Campylobacter jejuni was chosen as its chemosensors have been well studied and are known to respond to certain carbohydrates.1 We have modified naturally abundant polysaccharides such as chitosan with differing oligosaccharide motifs (often used in drug delivery2) in order to interfere with chemosensors responsible for bacterial motility. Our results have shown this to be quite a promising technique toward limiting bacterial movement and this work will be presented.  In addition, we have purified significant quantities of the chemosensor Tlp10 for further study with these polysaccharides.

  1. Elgamoudi, BA; Andrianova, EP; Shewell, LK; Day, CJ; King, RM; Taha; Rahman, H; Hartley-Tassell, LE; Zhulin, IB; Korolik, V. The Campylobacter jejuni chemoreceptor Tlp10 has a bimodal ligand-binding domain and specificity for multiple classes of chemoeffectors, Science Signaling, 2021, 14 (664), eabc8521.
  1. Mosaiab, T; Farr, DC; Kiefel, MJ; Houston, TA. Carbohydrate-Based Nanocarriers to Target Macrophages and Deliver Antimicrobial Agents, Adv. Drug Delivery Rev. 2019, 151-152, 94-129.