Adaikpoh Lab

Bacterial natural products are a valuable resource for discovering antifungals used to treat human infections. However, progress in finding new antifungals from bacteria has been slow in recent years. Several factors have hindered this progress, including inadequate techniques for discovering new antifungals, rediscovery of known compounds due to a focus on heavily studied bacterial genera, and the fact that only a few highly expressed biosynthetic gene clusters are accessed, since most genes remain inactive in laboratory conditions (i.e., no ecological pressure to trigger their expression).  We are interested in exploring the ecological interactions between plants and their associated rhizosphere bacteria to develop techniques for discovering new antibiotics.