Antibiotics are still the most important weapon to fight bacterial infections. However, medicine is running out of ammunition due to increasing resistance. One approach to the development of innovative antibiotics aims at the degradation process of defective proteins in bacteria.
The group of Prof. Dr. Stephan Sieber (Technical University of Munich) together with the group of Prof. Dr. Stefan Raunser, Director at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, have now unveiled the first high-resolution 3D structure of the protein degrading complex ClpX-ClpP and thus created an important structural basis for future pharmacological applications.