Understanding the nanoarchitecture of bacterial cell walls

Bacteria are a huge problem due to the advent of antibiotic resistance, modern health interventions rely on using antibiotics to enable many everyday hospital operations and even dialysis. In order to kill bacteria with greater efficacy we need to better understand the structures that bacteria have developed to protect them from their environment. To do this requires us to study the bacteria outer cell walls that provide them with such amazing stability. The AFM work shown in this proposal challenges the conventional paradigm and shows how much like a cross linked hydrogel the outer cell wall is. Using SANS and SESANS we plan to study large numbers of genetically identical bacteria cell to quantify this layer and its internal nanostructure.