Microbial drug target identification and validation

Abstract

The emergence of antibiotic resistance in major bacterial pathogens over the past decades poses great challenge to public health and emphasizes the need for new antimicrobial targets. The recent development of microbial genomics and the availability of genome sequences has allowed for the identification of essential genes which is of considerable significance because they represent potential targets for novel antibacterial drugs. While these sequence data potentially contain all the determinants of host-pathogen interactions and possible drug targets, computational tools for selecting suitable candidates for further experimental analyses are currently limited. This thesis work proposes to understand the genomics of the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa by identifying novel drug targets computationally, performing molecular validation on selected targets and computationally screening them for small molecule drugs.