HKUST Annual Report 2017-18

A N N U A L R E P O R T 2 0 1 7 - 1 8 HKUST 21 CAUSE OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE IDENTIFIED A research team led Prof. QIAN Peiyuan (Ocean Science) identified the cause of broad-spectrum bacterial resistance to peptide antibiotics for the first time, paving the way for new designs for drugs tackling superbugs. Peptide antibiotics are widely perceived as the last defense against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The team also discovered that the DRP enzyme identified as the cause of bacteria resistance was found in many strains of bacteria, providing a further alert in relation to the on-going improper use of antibiotics. The findings appeared in Nature Chemical Biology. LOW-RANK MATRIX RECOVERY FRAMEWORK Prof. CAI Jianfeng (Mathematics) proposed a framework for provable non-convex algorithms for low-rank matrix recovery, facilitating the reconstruction of a low-rank matrix from incomplete measurements. The algorithms were successfully applied to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to design effective sampling schemes and recovery algorithms to save data acquisition time and cost. The results have potential applications in a range of real-world problems in big data, artificial intelligence, imaging science, signal processing, and computer vision.