Singled out for success

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Tags: appointments, centenary-edition, discovery, IMB

Professor Jenny Martin, one of UQ's Australian Laureate Fellows

UQ has received two prestigious new national fellowships, targeting research into coral reef management and an alternative to antibiotics.

UQ’s Australian Laureate Fellowships are among only 15 selected from a nationwide field of 148, and are the only fellowships awarded to a Queensland university.

One of the University’s fellows, Professor Peter Mumby of the United Kingdom, is the sole expert to be attracted to Australia under the “foreign nationals” category of the scheme.

Professor Mumby and Professor Jenny Martin, of UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience, will each receive a major package of grant support, with average funding exceeding $2.7 million over five years for each successful fellow.

Professor Martin, will aim to develop a new class of antibacterial drugs that may avoid the problems of antibiotic resistance.

“Bacteria develop resistance because antibiotics work by killing most bacteria, leaving only the resistant bacteria alive,” Professor Martin said.

“My research will address this by developing compounds that won’t kill bacteria, but rather will inactivate a specific bacterial machinery responsible for causing disease.”

She said bacteria caused disease by producing molecules called virulence factors, which required a type of chemical bond known as disulfide bonds to function.

Professor Martin will develop drugs targeting the bacterial machinery that triggers the insertion of disulfide bonds into virulence factors.

“Infectious bacteria with mutations in their disulfide bond machinery are incapable of causing disease, highlighting the importance of this machinery in bacterial virulence, and the potential to develop an entirely new class of antibacterials that may avoid bacterial resistance mechanisms,” she said.

Professor Mumby’s research, which sits at the interface of remote sensing and ecology, has wide-ranging applications to the conservation of natural resources.

By Andrew Dunne

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