Coventry General Charities visit the Lab

Professor Christopher Dowson welcomed Trustees of the Coventry General Charities to view the laboratories where his team work on finding how antibiotic resistance develops and spreads and in finding new antibiotics.

At the University of Warwick, Prof Chris Dowson and his team have won over £3 million of public money to investigate a vital link in the chain of antimicrobial resistance – the bacterial cell wall. The main component of the wall is called peptidoglycan, which is the key target of penicillin and other similar antibiotics. Despite its important role, little is known about how peptidoglycan is made and how antibiotics interfere with it at the biochemical, structural and cellular levels. Without this knowledge we’re unlikely to understand how to develop new, effective antibiotics. This landmark project will pull together a unique group of world leaders in bacterial chemistry, genetics, physics and physiology in the area of peptidoglycan metabolism, structure and architecture. Academia, the pharmaceutical industry and charities will work hand in hand, on a global scale, in the hope to unlock new types of antibiotics.