Unlike humans, many bacteria rely on specialized membrane transporters — called energy-coupling factor transporters, or ECF transporters — to actively and efficiently import vitamins from their surroundings into the cell. What makes ECF transporters particularly attractive as a drug target is that human cells do not have them. HIPS is a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in collaboration with Saarland University. The starting point for both studies was a synthetic molecule identified in earlier work by the same group as an inhibitor of ECF transporters. The result was clear: Bacteria with silenced transporter genes became significantly more vulnerable to the experimental compounds, while bacteria carrying extra gene copies responded less sensitively.