Associate Professor Muhammad Shahid
University of Agriculture, Pakistan
Title: Extracellular Polymeric Substances (EPS): A part of Quorum Sensing in Microbial Biofilm for the Development of Extreme Resistance
Abstract:
Biofilms are formed by microbial aggregation using some solid support. During the process of biofilm formation microbes produce diverse nature of organic macromolecules called as extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), these EPS are working as the matrix and cushion of microbial protection. EPS are composed of arena of polysaccharides, proteins and nucleic acids. The EPS have applications in pharmaceuticals as therapeutic agents, cosmetics and are eco-friendly as they are biodegradable in nature. One research slot of our research group is working on studies related to microbial biofilm. We are developing the biofilms from different bacterial strains using Petri plate and micro titer plate assay. EPS were extracted by physical (heating, centrifugation and ultrasonication) and chemical (formaldehyde, sodium hydroxide and EDTA) methods. The carbohydrate, proteins and DNA content in EPS were measured by the different standard assays. EPS were characterized by using UV/Vis spectrophotometer, X-Ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and phase contrast microscopy. It is concluded that formaldehyde– NaOH process extracted the highest amounts of EPS from Gram positive and negative bacteria. All of these evidences suggested that the formaldehyde–NaOH extraction process did not cause cell lysis, and thus the extracted EPS were not contaminated by the intracellular substances. The cauterization of these EPS adopting state of the art techniques also provides very good evidence for the control of extensive microbial resistance and development of lead moieties for these targets.
Biography:
Dr. Muhammad Shahid is currently working as Associate Professor, in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan. He is leading a research group of Medicinal Biochemistry. His research group composed of more than 30 student including 7 PhD. He supervised a good number of M. Sc. and M. Phil including 8 PhD to his credit. He is also incharge of Bioassay section, a commercial activity of his research group. Dr. Shahid main areas of interest are bioactive compounds from diverse nature and source and their biological potential. About 150 reputed and indexed publications are to his credit with impact factor 200. He also wrote 7 book chapters in different books and many popular articles. Different national and international awarded including GA award, Young Investigator Award” from HUPO and many time Research Productivity Award from Pakistan Council for Science and Technology, Pakistan are part of his CV. He has also won different research projects as PI and Co-PI. He presented his research work at national and international event as invited speaker and resource person in different workshops. He also involved in arranging different scientific events at national level as organizer.