Exploitation of bacteriophages (phages) represents a highly promising alternative to antibiotics to detect and combat human bacterial pathogens. High specificity of phages for their hosts is an important attribute for their usage in medicine, food and analytics. However, molecular mechanisms of the infection process are ill understood which hampers the development of phage-derived applications. Tailspike proteins (TSP) are attached to the baseplate of bacteriophages and are known to be involved in the infection process. For some TSP candidates, O-antigen hydrolysis activity is proven qualitatively (Plattner, 2019; Witte, 2021). Phages may carry more than one kind of TSPs and the function of many of them remains unknown.

The goal of the project encompasses the method development for the determination of TSP binding affinities for the O-antigens.