Ribosome-targeting antimicrobial peptides show great promise as a means to tackle drug resistant bacteria (Charon et al., 2018). The Innis laboratory (University of Bordeaux – INSERM) in collaboration with J.-C. Baret’s group (Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal-CRPP, Bordeaux), is developing a microfluidics-based directed evolution approach to identify peptides that block bacterial translation by targeting the ribosome. The doctoral candidate will perform the microfluidics-based identification of novel inhibitory peptides, determine their mechanism of action using a combination of biochemical and structural (cryo-EM and/or X-ray) approaches, and identify variants with the ability to penetrate and neutralize Gram-negative bacteria. This interdisciplinary project will reveal how novel peptide-based inhibitors of translation block the ribosome and will help develop compounds to overcome resistant bacterial strains.

The Institut Européen de Chimie et Biologie-IECB is a thriving interdisciplinary research institute located on the campus of the University of Bordeaux, in the southwest of France. It is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities for structural biology, including a 200 kV Talos Arctica cryo-electron microscope equipped with a Falcon III direct detection camera. The Innis laboratory provides a highly dynamic international environment, where cutting edge research on bacterial translation and its regulation by peptides and antibiotics is carried out using structural, molecular and computational biology approaches. The doctoral candidate will benefit from access to dedicated CPU and GPU-based computational clusters to carry out his/her projects. The Innis laboratory also has regular access to synchrotron facilities (SOLEIL and ESRF).