The rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria stands to become a major threat to public health in the future, and new novel antibiotics are more important than ever as a result. In order to develop such a novel antibiotic, I am attempting to optimize a compound known to weakly inhibit the SigmaE pathway, an important stress-response pathway in Gram-negative bacteria. Upon developing enough compounds, they will be evaluated for effectives using a previously-developed reporter assay.