Services

Linnaeus provides access to its bacterial cytological profiling (BCP) platform to accelerate the discovery efforts of the pharmaceutical industry and to contribute to the global fight against antibiotic resistant bacteria.  Linnaeus works with clients on a large variety of discovery and development projects and develops specific projects or assays to meet the unique and demanding needs of its clients.  Some of these services include:
Screen chemical libraries to
identify novel antibiotics.

Our proprietary HTP-BCP platform can screen libraries on an industrial scale and provide preliminary activity and MOA information for all of the hits.

Screen natural product libraries.

One of the biggest challenges in natural product research is knowing which strains or extracts contain interesting bioactive compounds. BCP can determine which microbial strains produce interesting activities even before extracts are created, thereby focusing the labor intensive extraction and fractionation efforts on those few strains and extracts with proven potential. BCP can then determine the MOA of crude natural product extracts to identify those that have interesting bioactivities; in fact we routinely find multiple activities in crude extracts. Finally, BCP can guide purification of the desired activities, without wasting effort on undesired compounds or inactive fractions.

High resolution microscopy of bacterial
pathogens treated with antibiotics.

We provide high resolution images of bacterial pathogens treated with antimicrobials and directly observe cell killing in time-lapse microscopy, providing compelling visual evidence of drug effectiveness that can be used for a variety of purposes.

Determine the mode of action for
newly discovered antimicrobial compounds.

Our BCP platform can be used to rapidly identify and study the mechanism of action (MOA) for compounds active against Gram positive or Gram negative bacteria.

Determine how compounds
enter bacterial cells.

We have developed assays for measuring the uptake of fluorescently labeled compounds into bacterial cells, mammalian cells, or a combination of the two, to determine a compound’s relative binding affinity for each cell type.

Determine the subcellular location of
antimicrobial binding.

Knowing where a compound binds to a microbial cell can provide important information about MOA. Linnaeus can determine the subcellular location of binding (e.g., outer membrane, inner membrane, DNA, cell pole, cytosolic, or other cellular location) of fluorescently labeled compounds.