The discovery of penicillin ushered in the era of the mass use of antibiotics in clinical settings. Today the development of antibiotic resistance and lack of discoveries of new antibiotics have created a serious public health concern. Recently, new experimental tools, such as bacterial genome-wide deletion collections, have provided exciting new possibilities for studying biological networks in bacteria that could potentially also be exploited for antibiotic research. In this study, I used the Keio knockout collection of Escherichia coli (E.coli) strains, along with an in-house collection of hypomorphic alleles of essential genes, to study the effects of chemical perturbations by twenty-two antibiotics and four other chemicals on the biological pathways of E.coli. These experiments uncovered a set of mutants hypersensitive to drugs of different classes, information which could potentially be exploited for future antibiotic research. The results also shed light on how different classes of antibiotics behave with respect to their target pathways and the various functional modules with which they are associated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/32516 |
| Date | 24 July 2012 |
| Creators | Ali, Mehrab |
| Contributors | Greenblatt, Jack F. |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Dataset |
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